Bud Spencer & Terence Hill - Slaps And Beans 2

I'll be straight with you: my usual beat is netcode and TTK charts, not retro brawlers where the main weapon is a frying pan. But Slaps and Beans 2 landed on my desk and I spent a few hours with it, so here's the unvarnished take from someone who did not grow up watching Bud Spencer and Terence Hill movies. What you're getting is a side-scrolling beat-em-up in the vein of Final Fight or Streets of Rage, built around two Italian film icons from the 60s and 70s. The combat loop is deliberately minimal: light attack, heavy attack, a block button that reviewers across the board admit barely gets used, plus charged attacks and the ability to grab downed enemies and use them as improvised battering rams. Bud plays like a slow heavy hitter who can break obstacles and hurl bodies, while Terence is quicker and more acrobatic, able to climb and swing through environments. They have asymmetric strengths, which actually matters when you hit the puzzle segments that require you to swap between them or coordinate with a second player. Environmental weapons - bats, frying pans, fruit, vases - are everywhere, and each one lands with a slapstick sound effect that clearly means a lot to fans of the films. The mini-games are where this thing earns its keep beyond straight brawling. Scattered through the campaign and also available in a standalone four-player local party mode, they range from balancing a banana boat while dodging crocodiles to a food-eating contest, a card-matching game, and what amounts to a squash variant. One critic put it bluntly and I agree: these mini-games might be more fun than the main game. The set pieces in the campaign proper are genuinely inventive - unleashing caged lions to assist in a boss fight is exactly the kind of absurd stuff that stops the repetition from fully setting in. The problem is that the repetition still sets in. Wave after wave of reskinned enemies in the brawling sections will wear on anyone who is not emotionally invested in the license. No online multiplayer is the obvious hard stop for anyone solo on PC. This is a local co-op game dressed up as a singleplayer game, and while the AI does control the character you are not using during solo play, with a button swap to change who you are, the experience is built for two people on a couch. The voice dubbing covers English, Italian, German, and Spanish, and the soundtrack is handled by Oliver Onions, the composers from the original films - that detail matters to the fanbase and is a legitimate production upgrade over the first game. Hitbox inconsistencies and occasional difficulty spikes are the rough edges critics flagged, and those are fair criticisms. Replay value is limited: chapter scores are tracked and multiple difficulty levels exist, but the appeal drops sharply once you know the solutions to the puzzle gags. For a genre comparison: if Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder's Revenge is your benchmark, this does not hit that level of combat depth or polish. The OpenCritic aggregate sits around 73 across 15 critics, which is an accurate read - solid, not genre-leading. If you grew up watching these two comedians trade slaps in dubbed action movies, this is the game you wanted. If you did not, it is a competent but shallow brawler that runs out of surprises faster than the campaign runs out of runtime. Fred, Scout Team