Samurai Riot (PC) Review

Back in the day, the arcade-style beat 'em up genre was responsible for many of the most heavily occupied arcade cabinets, and it is not hard to see why. The fast-paced and hectic gameplay created an experience that, during the short time the player would stay alive, was giving them enough bang for the quarter to throw them right back in the line once the game over screen appeared, and it was also a genre that could easily translate into a wonderful two-player experience, doubling the fun, and, of course, the profit.

It was also a genre that translated pretty well to consoles, and, as a result, became a big hit during both the 8-bit and 16-bit eras. Nowadays, those kind of games are somewhat hard to find, and even harder is it to find those that catches the arcade feel. Samurai Riot attempts to capture this aspect, and it does a mighty fine job while at it.

Its arcade aspects are great and contain features built around making this feel authentic, with permadeaths, a neat high score system to make avid veterans and newcomers alike chase after the best score possible, a timer so that people can aim at completing this as fast as possible. There is even an old-school co-op mode that works extremely well thanks to both the arcade features, but also thanks to the story which focus on choices, meaning that the two players must decide what to do during certain crossroads.

It is fun and it is neat, but the core aspects of the game could do much better. The combat system is extremely simplistic, even for an arcade beat 'em up such as this, hurting this title a lot, as the multiple endings could have given it lots of replayability, but it all simply falls flat, as the gameplay feels weak. Another big problem is the graphics…

Beside the fact that the characters' movements look very stiff for a samurai-themed beat 'em up, so much that it is sometimes extremely difficult to see the difference between breakable objects and the background, due to how everything melts together, which leads to you trying hitting everything that could even maybe be a breakable object on your hunt for health and extra lives. It becomes very repetitive after a while to try to hit every background object in hope that it is a breakable object, and only serve to further harm the replay value, as each route has new stages with new backgrounds to figure out what is breakable or not.

The arcade experience in Samurai Riot is great, but the gameplay and graphics does sadly hold it back a bit too much. People who are purely out after a co-op arcade experience who do not care about much else will be hard pressed to find a better modern take on that experience, but it comes with mediocre gameplay that with some tweaks could have become much better.