Retro Review - River City Ransom
Today we go back to the past, this time with a title that could be considered as one of the pioneers of the beat'em up genre, a game that has been a bit eclipsed by other excellent titles of the same genre unfairly, because you could say that thanks to this particular title, there are the other beat'em up that are so loved and known nowadays. Very few people know about this excellent and quite comical 8-bit beat'em up and for me it is of great importance to give recognition to this excellent video game.
As you'd expect from a game like this, its storyline is the least of it. In fact, what I like about this particular type of game is that there's no need to understand its history, since our main task is to go and defeat any enemy who thinks he can stop us, when he knows he'll never make it.
River City Ransom is a beat'em up or as I like to call them, "me versus the neighborhood" and that's basically our task in this video game. The story begins in River City, a pretty quiet city, everything was peaceful until a malicious and powerful mafia boss takes the city and takes it over, his gang is in charge of causing chaos and panic to the inhabitants, to the point of kidnapping the schoolmates of our main characters (Alex and Ryan), but as if that wasn't enough they also kidnap Ryan's girlfriend, so the situation became even more personal. Now our two furious and brave heroes will have to face the whole horde of Slick's henchmen, who is the boss of the gang, and then get in front of him and beat him, in order to rescue his classmates and Ryan's girlfriend.
River City Ransom is the clear example that with 8-bit graphics you can make true works of art and that is that despite the obvious limitations in the use of 8-bit graphics is undeniable the excellent design work that was done in this video game. Its characters, in spite of not having extremely precise details, have enough level so that even today you can talk very well about them and the fact is that visually this game has aged really well, it still maintains its charisma and personality of that time and I have to say that this is something extremely difficult to achieve.
Although it is not possible to create sufficiently accurate animations because of the 8 bits, River City Ransom does what is necessary to make certain expressions correct and accurate enough to be distinguishable. The character sprites feature the classic "super deformed" design that is characterized by the fact that the characters have relatively small bodies compared to their heads, which are always a little bigger, so that gives it a cartoon style that also thanks to the excellent added sense of humor that River City Ransom has makes a powerful combination.
The scenarios have a very Japanese style (the events of this videogame take place in a fictional city that recreates certain aspects of the ancient cities of Japan) and despite the 8 bits it's really a work worth admiring, in fact this kind of graphics is one of my favorites, I even like to look for wallpapers that have this particular style of graphics, because with few resources you can do really wonderful things.
I think that for a beat'em up music is quite important, but above all it should be music that encourages punching and kicking our enemies, so having music with fast and catchy rhythms is perfect for a better game experience and River City Ransom is quite good in this aspect, as its tunes are very catchy and with an excellent rhythm that easily after completing some stage at the moment we will be humming it. The sound effects are not that good, they are really quite basic and sometimes repetitive.
Well, what else can I say that I haven't said before about the beat'em up genre? I don't think there's much to say about this genre and that it's just one of the most fun and addictive types of video games in the industry, because giving us the ability to move through enemy-plagued scenarios and having our main task be to defeat them using all sorts of skills, weapons and attack combos is one of the most satisfying things in video games. This is one of the aspects that River City Ransom fulfills in an excellent way, since having all these possibilities makes this title and many others just as good as this one one, one of the most exploited genres some years ago.
River City Ransom served as a base for many beat'em up that came out after it, in this particular title we can use different types of weapons that we will be obtaining when defeating our enemies, weapons that range from: knives, sticks and tubes, all weapons that are already classic and even cliché of the genre. But also, as added River City Ransom has a certain RPG aspect, since our character has a list of stats that we can improve by buying certain items with coins that the enemies will give us once we have defeated them, so we can customize our character as we want, but depending on the stats we improve our character will be better or worse for certain enemies. Also we can learn special skills and attacks that we can learn when we buy books, in a few words River City Ransom is a beat'em up with basic features of this style games but with an added RPG that makes it stand out from others.
River City Ransom is a great game, an excellent "me against the neighborhood" of the classics and that unfortunately is not as remembered as others of the same genre. It is not an extremely long game, in a few hours we will have finished it, but it has a great level of re-playability as we can customize our character according to the stats we choose and its cooperative mode is quite fun.
