Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise of the Dragons

• Genre: Beat 'em up
• Time Played: 2+ Hours
• Partner: Alice
• Too Short/Long: Overall the game feels too short.
• Pleased/Disappointed: It was fun, pleased on that department, just wish there was more.
• Why I played: No reason other than it was Double Dragon and I needed something different to play than what was already in my rotation.
• Recommend to others: Overall I'd recommend it, with the warning of how short it is for a single run.

Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise of the Dragons is a perfectly serviceable Beat 'em up. It doesn't have the fan service of a game like Shredder's Revenge, and it doesn't have the longevity of River City Girls. It's controls are pretty tight, and I'm glad I can do specials without sacrificing health. There are also a decent selection of characters each with their own special moves to make them fairly unique.

The main problem I have is just, it feels too short. Granted, a lot of old beat 'em ups are only a couple hours long if you can actually get through them, but they're difficult due to either clunkiness or weird hit detection that this game doesn't really suffer from, but it makes them feel much longer because you're likely not going to get through on your first try and have to restart.

While there is an option for it, if you fail, you don't necessarily have to restart if you either have money to revive or tokens to continue, but at least on default settings, this wasn't really a problem for Alice and I. We had a lot of fun with it, but even though there are a bunch of unlockables, there isn't really much of an incentive to continue playing to see more in-game content.

Levels can be longer depending on your order, so I guess it may be worth at least a second play through, playing the opposite level order, just to see some of the areas we may have missed out on, but I think I'll save that for 4 players... is what I would say if it had 4 players. One other glaring flaw is that despite the fact you take 4 characters into battle, and with 1 or 2 players, there is a tag in-out system. There is no option for 4 player. It seems like the game may have potentially been made with the idea of 4 player in mind and for some reason it wasn't implemented. Maybe they thought it was too chaotic on screen? Couldn't balance the difficulty? I don't know but it feels like a missed opportunity.

Other than that, I guess if you're the type of person who likes replaying games just to play them at higher difficulties and get better scores or something, there might be a bit of replay-ability. There are mutators available for your run available from the start, so that's neat, if you like that. I personally don't care about those options too much.