River City Melee Mach!!

I came into River City Melee Mach!! looking for a couch brawler that could pull weight at a small LAN and left with a pretty clear picture of what this game is and, more importantly, what it is not. It is a four-player arena fighter built on ancient NES-era Kunio-kun bones, ported to PC with a roster that is genuinely absurd in size and online infrastructure that is essentially non-functional. The moment you understand those two facts, your decision is easy. The fighting system runs on the same punch-kick-throw framework the Kunio series has used since the Famicom days. Do not let that fool you into thinking it plays itself. Raw punches and kicks get you bodied fast. You need to invest time into learning the special moves - there are over 250 of them spread across the roster - and figure out how to cancel them into follow-ups to do real damage. Characters carry starting weapons too, things like bokkens, brass knuckles, and chains, and the arenas scatter random pickups across the floor. Stage edges punish careless movement because getting thrown off the boundary is an instant round loss. That edge-guard risk adds a layer of genuine tension to what would otherwise just be button-mash chaos. The mode list is reasonable for a local party game. Battle Royal is the obvious draw: four players, anything goes, last team standing. Team Attack pairs you with a partner in a tornado-tag format. Change Match is an endurance test where you pick a new character every time yours gets eliminated and the rounds keep going until the clock hits zero or everyone is out. Endless Battle is a single-player survival grind that gets repetitive fast, and the single-player story mode covers 30 teams each with their own motivation for entering the tournament - fine for unlocking content, thin as actual entertainment. The roster lets you build custom teams, so mixing and matching characters from different schools across the Kunio universe is genuinely fun for fans of the franchise. Here is the PC-specific reality check. The game only has partial controller support, and community reports confirm Xbox controllers can flat-out refuse to register inputs without manual workarounds. That is a serious quality-of-life failure for a game whose entire identity is local multiplayer. Online play is technically present but the PC playerbase is thin enough that finding a match organically is close to impossible. Steam community posts are actively trying to coordinate groups just to trigger the online achievement. If you are buying this hoping to grind online with strangers, save yourself the frustration. The visual presentation also clashes badly - old 8-bit character sprites dropped onto flat 3D backgrounds that look cheaper than they should at any resolution. It does not ruin the action, but it is not pretty on a 1440p monitor. For Kunio-kun series veterans or retro brawler fans who have three other humans in the same room and patience for the controller setup jank, there is a real fun hour or two here per session. For anyone coming in solo, or expecting a functional online ranked experience, this is the wrong game entirely. The character count is impressive on paper; balance across 180-plus fighters is, predictably, all over the place, with special-move-heavy characters dominating Endless Battle mode in particular. Arc System Works made a passion project for a specific audience and mostly delivered for that audience.

Fred · Scout Team

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