Brutal Rage review

Brutal Rage tells the story of cops of wrongfully accused of a crime they didn’t commit; a perfect case of wrong place at the wrong time. In order to clear their names and find the culprit, Kurt and Mac embark on a brutal path of retribution taking down every criminal standing in their way.

Brutal Rage is a 2D beat’up that will take players on 6 different missions as they punch and kick their way across various locations in search of justice. You can pick up a few weapons scattered around the levels that can either be used to attack or throw at your enemies. Along with you punches and kicks, you can also pick up and throw your enemies; a great way to get yourself out of a bind if surrounded. Oddly enough, while your enemies can, the protagonists can’t block. I don’t know if it’s an accidental or voluntary omission, but it could have improved combat a bit.

When jumping into the game, you can select between three difficulty settings: Easy, Normal and Hard and also choose between three characters; two available from the getgo with a third unlockable one. You can switch character in between levels; considering they have the same moveset and going through the same story, it doesn’t change anything.

As you fight your way through waves of bad guys, there’s a Rage Meter under your health bar which fills up progressively. Once filled, players can activate the Rage where the character gets a temporary boost in strength and speed punching and kicking enemies off the screen. It’s a neat mechanic but it barely lasts like 3 seconds, so you gotta be quick to clear the screen.

As with any beat’em up, the game features a few boss fights. Unfortunately, they’re some of the worst bosses ever conceived. While the first one is actually quite a pushover, the other three are cheap, frustrating and overpowered; the worst of the bunch being the final boss. I’m not going into details, but we’re talking Street Fighter IV’s Seth level of cheapness and frustration.

To break the repetitive nature of beating people up, there are a few motorcycle sequences where you ride down the road en route to your next destination. It’s actually pretty fun, albeit a bit rough around the edges as you have not only keep your eyes out for gas canisters so the motorcycle doesn’t run out of gas, but also check the indicator of incoming traffic in a darker, harder to see the setting. While the canisters are easy to spot, the indicator not so much, but thankfully, it doesn’t go that fast so either way, you can easily dodge traffic.

The game features three different game modes: Tutorial, Story and Brutal Club. While the first two are pretty self-explanatory, Brutal Club is basically the game’s answer to a Horde mode. You have to survive 10 waves of enemies with a single life. Considering the game’s lack of depth with its combat, there’s really no reason to attempt Brutal Club unless you’re itching to get all Achievements.

Once you’re done with the story mode, there are no incentives to replay it. At all. Sure, there are three characters to choose from but they have all the same moveset so nothing really changes. You can always tackle the other difficulty settings, but even on Easy, the bosses are a frustrating mess of a chore; so I can only imagine how hair pulling it can be on Hard.

On the presentation side of things, for a pixelated game, it does look the part. Environments vary well enough from one another, enemies, while limited, are present in a decent variety. It’s also colorful, minus a few darker toned areas. Each protagonist, while moving similarly, does look different from one another. I do have to note that during the final battle, I came across frustrating glitches where either my character would lock into either wall and where the final boss would either fly up or down *in* the wall or come out the other side. Thankfully, it’s not game-breaking as all you have to do is let yourself be killed, but it made ten times more frustrating than it already was. The soundtrack is ok at best; an attempt at the dark synthwave genre but it feels a bit unpolished and is limited variety-wise. Characters grunts when dying and obviously as an old throwback to the genre, there are no voice-overs, but plenty of missing punctuations in the text.

As I was playing through the game’s six chapters, I was trying really hard to find any redeeming qualities for the game. I’m a die-hard fan of beat’em ups and maybe I set my expectations a bit too high, but unfortunately, I cannot recommend Brutal Rage. Frustrating boss design, mind-numbingly repetitive, two identical characters, no combat depth, Brutal Rage feels like a demo of what could be.