River City Girls 2 Review

Misako and Kyoko are back, along with their boyfriends and newcomers Marian and Provie, to clean the streets of River City! The events of River City Girls 2 pick up after the first game where Misako and Kyoko defeated Sabuko, daughter of Sabu, leader of the Sanwakai yakuza clan. Once learning this, Sabu escaped from jail, and gathered his henchmen in order to take care of our protagonists himself.

River City Girls 2 is another entry in the popular beat’em up genre. Each of the four characters has a normal and strong attack and can block and run. As you beat up enemies earn experience points and level up, you’ll learn new special attacks that will consume a specific meter so you can’t spam special attacks over and over. The meter refills over time or can be refilled by items purchased in various shops.

Speaking of which, the game features a bevy of shops that will sell items that refill your health, stamina, and equipable accessories. Buying items can also have bonus perks such as increase strength or any other character ability. Equipping purchased accessories can give characters additional perks such as picking up money refilling a bit of health or adding a low chance of electrifying enemies when using strong attacks.

While there’s a total of 6 playable characters, you can also hire additional muscle for temporary backup. Some areas will have NPCs who will request some money in exchange for their services. Once you’ve beaten up enemies to a certain level of health, they’ll get on their knees to beg for their life; pressing RT or LT, the NPC will join your ranks and will be able to join in the fight for the length of a few attacks to give you a leg up or get you out of a mess. Two NPCs can be “equipped” at a time and once used, they’ll need a cooldown period before being available again.

There are also a few Safehouses peppered through the map. This is where you’ll be able to respawn, store items, swap NPC backup you’ve found, or switch out the playable character. While this is fun, given the game gets slowly progressively harder, swapping out a Level 9 character for a Level 3 once for example might not be the best of ideas. If you want to keep them on the same level, it’s going to require a lot of grinding near a safehouse.

The game’s biggest nuisance is the constant loading screens. Every time you move to a different area, there’s a Please wait… loading screen. Sure, it might take a few mere seconds, but it does get annoying when sometimes the loading is longer than the area especially if you’re avoiding combat to reach the objective as quickly as possible. Beat up a few enemies, loading, rinse and repeat. It breaks the flow of the game. Additionally, the character movement (including combat) feels stiff. I replayed a bit of the first game to compare, and the sequel clearly feels like we’re controlling a tank whereas the first one , movement and combat were quick and fluid. This slow-ish movement makes some circumstances with a required quick turnaround frustrating; case in point the first boss battle against Ken.

While there’s a block button, it does feel a bit useless as a whole and a dodge button might’ve been a better alternative. While the block button is useful when trying to figure out which of the handful of enemies will attack first, if an enemy starts up a combo, you can’t even block between their attacks even when there is clearly enough time and frames to launch the block animation.

Presentation-wise, WayForward crafted another colorful visually beautiful gaming experience mixing pixels and comic book-like cutscenes. Each area of the wider maps is uniquely designed and none two look a like. Audio-wise, this is another winner. Megan McDuffee is back as the composer of the soundtrack and it’s another banger. Oddly enough, the game does also include tracks from the first game, but the newly crafted tunes are as addictive as the previous game soundtrack and Ms. McDuffee’s voice is as memorizing as ever. If you’re interested, feel free to give it a listen on bandcamp. The voice-over work is also very solid with lines delivered with conviction.

River City Girls 2 is a deeper, bigger sequel that expands on the original. Unfortunately, the movement/combat feels like they went a step backward given it feels stiffer than the first game. The constant loading screen is also baffling. That being said, everything else makes up for it. A bigger map, new features, more playable characters, and another banging soundtrack make this another must-play this year. If you can overlook the nuisance, River City Girls 2 is another great addition to the beat’em up genre. Highly recommended.