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With the belt-scrolling beat ’em up undergoing something of a renaissance of late, it feels like a new title enters the fray every other week. While some efforts utilise IPs like Double Dragon and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to garner attention, others are rekindling the genre’s magic with original ideas. Enter Nuala Studio with Vengeance Hunters, a fledgling project that’s notable for its development platform, the Neo Geo, a 34-year-old piece of arcade hardware.
Vengeance Hunters doesn’t shy away from cliche. Its introduction pans over a brooding city skyline while describing a dystopian future under threat from “High rolling suitmen. Captains of industry. Bastards of the upper crust.” Vaguely political, then. Enter three protagonists, the awkwardly titled Candy, Golem, and Loony; an athletic female, a bulky robot, and a brawny part-cyborg male, respectively.
One thing you can’t fail to be impressed by is Vengeance Hunter’s graphics. Nuala Studio’s artists really put in the work here. The backgrounds are full of detail, with superb colour casting and palette blends forming the game’s far-flung reaches. You roam through forestry, wastelands, city streets and your obligatory (and arguably less interesting) corporate headquarters. Tonally it feels like an ’80s cartoon with bite, something along the lines of COPS or Bravestarr: adult enough with its vibe, occasionally bursting with blood, while maintaining its traditional arcade game roots.
It looks good in motion, too, with large, well-animated sprites that traverse the screen in unique and interesting ways. Audio-wise it’s good enough, heavily synthy, evoking a pseudo-’80s sci-fi feel – but it lacks a certain edge and authenticity. It sounds like it wants to be Streets of Rage in places, but it’s softer and more ambient, less impactful or memorable.
The combat system features some clever nuance, and while not as combo-heavy as something like Winkysoft’s Guardians (1995), there are several unique elements that draw from more modern ideas. Each character has a weak and hard attack, a jump and a signature move that can be used infinitely. Pressing both attack buttons dually engages a traditional breakout move, paid with a portion of your life bar.
However — and we like this idea a lot — rather than outright losing your health, the portion you gamble on the breakout is greyed out. Should you successfully then lay into your opponents without interruption, you can beat that grey back to a stable yellow. It’s a smart and effective way to manage an old staple of the genre, and brings with it greater strategic dimensions.
The combo system is flexible, too. In fact, there are juggle opportunities that, should you have the reflex, resemble certain advanced fighting games, allowing you to hop into the air on repeat to tag hits before following up with either a standing hard attack or signature move. Candy is the weakest of the three characters. Compared to Golem and Loony she’s just not as interesting, and underpowered. Loony has the advantage of a projectile signature move, able to shoot his robotic arm across the screen, leveraging his relatively slow speed by keeping encroaching enemies at bay.
Golem, the robot, is the best for our money, sporting both muscle power and speed, with a signature move that allows you to grab enemies on both ground and in the air, and swing them forward or pile-drive them backwards. There are also charged special moves that can be added to strings or juggles, and each character can double-tap forward to dash and attack.
On the whole, Vengeance Hunters is a good project with some depth. We like the fact that the bosses have distinct patterns, and there are secret sub-sections and story variations depending on who you play as. At one point you hop on a bike and go driving through the desert wastelands, avoiding toxic barrels and squid-like creatures; while elsewhere, you challenge a boss in a virtual one-on-one fighting game on an arcade cabinet. These novel touches do well to break up the repetition and encourage replayability.
Despite the solid positives, though, there are a few areas we take issue with. The difficulty is well-balanced, fairly challenging on defaults, and encourages learning and experimentation. But, at the same time, there are aspects that get a little trying. For some reason, there are tons of things blowing up in the game: barrels, bombs, bombs inside boxes, pipe bombs, and even enemies. Things seem to be blowing up all over the place, and honestly a little too regularly. You can learn to avoid these incendiary dangers, but, since you can’t pick the bombs up, it gets frustrating when you keep getting either knocked out of your flow by an explosion or having to break off your attacks to evade one.
Additionally, there are secondary weapons to wield, but they’re weird. Rather than your regular swords and pipes, they come in the form of cannons that hover over your character’s head and fire isometrically. That means you need to be stood slightly above and diagonally to catch enemies with them. They’re hardly impossible to make good use of, but it’s one of those ideas that may have seemed better on paper, since they’re not particularly satisfying to use. Compared to the whopping great rifles available in something like Capcom’s The Punisher, they don’t do much to enhance the gameplay.
Crucially, the combat, while arranged in such a way that experimentation pays off, falls just shy of those solid connections in many ’90s arcade games of the same mould. It works, but the feedback isn’t quite on the same level. Combo manufacturing feels good, but there’s something missing from the overall weight.
One of the oddest omissions, though, is not being able to grab anyone. We feel like grabs are an integral part of belt scrollers as they allow you to crowd herd, and while one could argue that Vengeance Hunters is going its own way, the absence still feels odd. This is particularly evident when playing as Golem, who is probably the most enjoyable character in the game largely due to the fact that he has a grab as his signature move.
There are five quite drawn-out stages to work through, but learning them and their accompanying boss encounters will take some time. It might seem odd that you start the game in a rainforest fighting Amazonian zombies — especially after the futuristic city skyline of the opening story — but at least it’s interesting. Some of the later locations aren’t quite as original. Finally, local co-op is available for two players, but there’s no online here.
Conclusion
Vengeance Hunters does many things well. Its pixel art is superb across the board, with some very cool-looking enemies. It also has a lot of interesting ideas in its combat mechanics that allow seasoned gamers to dig deep. It’s a game that ranges from the impressive to the occasionally dubious. Enemy repetition starts to grate a little, but then excellent and imaginative boss battles redress the balance. We don’t feel quite so comfortable with the omission of grabs, the odd format of its sub-weaponry, or its rather overbearing number of explosive obstacles, but we can’t ignore that it’s competent and well-executed in many other key areas. Essential? Perhaps it falls just short of that, but for fans of the genre and those who get a thrill out of mining combo possibilities, there’s a bright, solid, and at times rather clever belt scroller here.