
You can play alone, but c’mon, you deserve better. The game takes skill, in other words, but it’s light on strategy. Image: Lizardcube, Guard Crush Games, Dotemu/Dotemu But most enemies are little more than punching bags with knives taped to their side. The final boss fight is hilariously complex and annoyingly difficult, designed like a classic arcade boss meant to fleece you out of every quarter in your pocket. Endgame minibosses have Punch-Out!!-style tells, cueing you to move out of the way or rush in with an uppercut to the jaw. Kickboxers block attacks, so you must grapple them - accomplished by literally walking into them. Some enemies require a little bit more strategy than others. There’s no button to guard yourself from attacks, so a good defense is moving up and down the screen to avoid getting kicked in the throat, while conserving health power-ups for the moment your health bar is nearly (but not fully!) depleted. The combat has been improved a bit from the 16-bit era, but this is still a game in which you’ll spend most of the time bashing the same attack button, occasionally tapping the jump button to evade an attack, dealing a special move that can cost some of your own life, or unleashing a limited ultra move that slaughters any weak enemies standing in its way. There’s enough neon to melt your eyeballs
