Beat’Em Up Archives Review

Beat’Em Up Archives is a collection of two beat’em up games straight out the 1990s. First up is Iron Commando where players can choose between Jake, a soldier, and Chang Li, a martial arts master as they head on a mission to clean up the streets from G.H.O.S.T., an evil organization looking to capture a radioactive meteorite. And the second game is Legend where players can either play as Kaor or Igor as they hunt down the corrupt son of the land’s king, Clovis, in the kingdom of Sellech.

While roaming around the streets of Iron Commando, you’ll be able to pick up a handful of weapon in order to stand a chance against the waves of enemies. Players will find baseball bats, knives or even firearms. Contrary to most beat’em ups that features firearms, players can actually accumulate ammo; while it doesn’t sound helpful because the gun vanishes once it’s empty, when you’ll find the next one, you’ll have a bit more ammo. You also have a special move that uses grenades that damages everyone within a certain radius, but enemy damage is minimal. You can also grab enemies for some up close smashing or throw them around.

In Legend however you have your trusty sword and magic spells that require you to collect MP in order to use it. Trying to use it when the MP is at zero sees the character seemingly throwing something, although it’s not very clear. To counteract the slow moving characters, Legend thankfully lets you block enemy attacks in the direction you’re blocking, giving you a small chance of saving some health and you can counter-attack rather quickly.

Both games look great in their arcade style pixelated visuals. It obviously doesn’t match more recent beat’em ups (such as the duo of River City Girls games) given their age, but while they haven’t improved the gameplay at all, leaving the visual intact makes for a fun old-school interesting. You can also change the filter to CRT for example, but damn does it look ugly on an HD television. Both games’ soundtrack have remained intact as well, but while the soundtrack for Legend does sound familiar, they are both far from being classic bangers.

The problem with these games, is the same thing you’ll see, or not see from the revived classics from Qubyte and PIKO: the lack of quality of life improvements. As we all know, not all games have aged well and these are no different. And despite the base games having three difficulty settings (Easy, Normal and Hard) there isn’t much difference in terms of gameplay. Also, most weapons are inconsequential; you can’t even kill a single enemy with a baseball bat or knife. In Iron Commando, you can use a special attack via Grenade by pressing Y… but it doesn’t work because the game doesn’t tell you you need to jump and *then” press Y for the grenade.

The other problem is that these games are the definition of cheap. Enemies will quickly surround you and make your life a living hell by draining your life-bar; especially in Iron Commando. If you see two enemies surround you, be ready to be bounced around like a beach ball. Thankfully, Legend is a bit more forgiving when it comes to generic enemies, but boss battles are a pain because they move three times as fast as you making dodging their attack basically impossible. What’s baffling is that Iron Commando and Legend came out in 1995 and 1994 respectively, yet years before that there was already much better solid beat’em ups such as Final Fight and Double Dragon II. Why the then developers didn’t take clues and inspirations from such classics is puzzling.

While they are playable, given the amount of better beat’em ups available on Xbox Marketplace, there’s absolutely no reason to buy this unless you’ve played the originals back in the day or you’re a masochists; even Soulsborne fans might not tolerate this outdated bundle. In 2023, in an era where remasters normally get a bit of love in terms of gameplay or presentation, there’s no reason to release this kind of outdated package. While Legend is mid at best, Iron Commando is a frustrating, cheap experience that will make players quit halfway through the first level. Save your money for better games such as both River City Girls games or Fight N’ Rage.