River City Ransom: Underground

River City Ransom: Underground is a side-scrolling open-world brawler with genuine RPG teeth. You pick from a roster of ten playable characters, each with their own distinct fighting style and move pool, then grind money from street gangs to spend at dojos scattered across the city, unlocking new techniques move by move. Stat growth works through a layered food-and-leveling system: defeating enemies raises your XP threshold, but your actual attributes only climb when you buy and eat items from shops, visit the sauna, or purchase books. It is eccentric, occasionally opaque, and 100% faithful to the weird DNA of the 1989 original. The combat is where Underground earns its keep. This is not a button-masher in the Streets of Rage mold. Every character carries a hefty movelist - grapples, evasive rolls, launcher combos, weapon attacks that deal serious damage but leave you wide open - and the enemy AI actually knows how to read you, especially in later stages where bosses and gang lieutenants start dodging and countering with alarming aggression. Striking-focused fighters like Glen and Ryan feel approachable from the start. Grapple-heavy characters like Rudy demand patience, a few dojo purchases, and a willingness to eat dirt while you learn. The payoff when a full combo chain lands and bodies go flying is genuinely satisfying in a way most modern brawlers never quite achieve. There is also a wanted-level system, where vandalism and civilian beatdowns summon riot police who chase you through the city - a small touch that adds texture to what could have been empty streets. Here is the honest caveat, though, and it is a real one: the mid-to-late game buckles. Direction in the open city is famously murky - you can wander for long stretches without any clear nudge toward the next story beat, relying on a day-night cycle that gates certain events and mostly just pads runtime. The narrative framing, in which a new crew called The Flock gets framed for kidnapping the mayor's daughter, is thin enough to see through. If you come for branching dialogue and meaningful story decisions, look elsewhere. The writing has charm and wry humor, but it is not doing heavy lifting. The XP-per-character system also punishes experimentation: switching to a new fighter means starting their grind from scratch, which discourages the roster variety the game is otherwise proud of. What Underground gets undeniably right is production craft. The pixel art is sharp and expressive, character sprites overflowing with personality compared to their NES ancestors. The soundtrack, composed by Disasterpeace (Hyper Light Drifter, FEZ), evokes chiptune nostalgia while sounding distinctly modern. Four-player local and online co-op is present, and multiplayer is where the game genuinely sings once all participants have enough moves unlocked to stop being dead weight. The PvP mode gives the deep movelist a real workout. Launch was rocky - bugs, missing autosave, stat regressions - but the developers patched aggressively in the months after release, and the game today is in noticeably better shape than what reviewers encountered at day one. If you grew up with the NES original or have any fondness for brawlers that reward system mastery over reflexes, Underground offers something genuinely rare in the genre. It is rougher than it should be, and a proper quest marker would have saved everyone considerable headache. But the combat ceiling is high, the character variety is real, and a co-op session with matched-level friends is a reliable good time. Approach it as an action-RPG that happens to be a brawler, consult a community move guide early, and you will get more out of it than players who bounced off the slow opening grind.

Monika · Scout Team

RPGs

Be the first to comment on River City Ransom: Underground.