Vigilante
Reviewed by Michael LoCascio
While you can hardly find them on any of today's advanced
systems, side-scrolling beat 'em-ups used to be extremely
popular. The Genesis and SNES both had an abundance of
fighters, and while many of them were mediocre, some were
spectacular. Streets of Rage and Final Fight whetted the
appetite of gamers who enjoyed the genre, but while Sega and
Nintendo had those masterpieces to represent their
platforms, the Turbo had Vigilante.
Tell me if you've heard this one before: a gang of bad guys
takes over the neighborhood and kidnaps a girl. The girl's
boyfriend becomes awfully vexed at the situation, and
decides to go out and beat up every bad guy he sees until he
finds the leader of the gang and rescues his girlfriend.
Well, that's Vigilante's story in a nutshell. But an
unoriginal story in this case is forgivable; who needs a
deep plot in a side-scrolling fighter? And, to be fair,
Vigilante's graphics and sounds are relatively good.
But Vigilante's downfall doesn't involve any of the
aforementioned elements. The thing that kills this title is
the gameplay: it's unoriginal, uninspired, and downright
boring. Press one button to kick, press the other button to
punch. Not a whole lot of technique in this game - just
crank up the turbo switches and pummel anyone who gets in
your way. Stand in one place, hold down the kick button -
and watch as your character easily knocks out three or four
bad guys. Walk a few steps forward and repeat the process.
Occasionally, you'll find some nunchuks which basically make
you invincible to any of the regular bad guys (as if the
game weren't easy enough already).
While all of the game's five levels seem to breeze by, the
bosses are another story. It's not that they're difficult to
beat, but they take some time to wear down. Rather than
there being a dramatic, difficult confrontation to look
forward to at the end of each level, there's a tedious
exercise in boredom. Punch them a few times, take a few
steps away, than punch them again. Occasionally they'll
decide to throw a punch at you (which will probably take
away half of your life meter if they manage to connect), but
most gamers shouldn't have any trouble defeating them.
The most deplorable thing about Vigilante is not that it
doesn't stack up to a fantastic title like Streets of Rage.
But this game can't even hold a candle to the NES version of
Double Dragon. In essence, Vigilante is a simple,
unimpressive fighting game that won't last for more than a
couple of plays.
Overall: 3 out of 10
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