by [name redacted]

Originally published by Next Generation.

With the public rehabilitation of the shooter in games like Ikaruga and Gradius V, the industry is apparently looking to the brawler for its next miracle; this year we can expect to see at least three significant attempts to remodel the genre into something people might want to play again. Of these, Cavia’s Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance can claim both the worst title and the oddest implementation.

The object of the game’s main mode is to build a street gang for yourself, with which to tackle large melee battles. You achieve this by propositioning random passers-by; either they join you right off or your voice actor says something profane and a one-on-one battle ensues. A few broken boards and uppercuts later, the fight ends either in death or in a headlock and a switchblade to your opponent’s throat, at which point he becomes your friend. He might swear at you first.

The game tries to make sense of this action by grounding it in videogame pedantry: physical appearances matter to the people you interact with, meaning lots of character management; although your main character gains levels, her posse doesn’t, so there’s a gang management element; there’s an epic revenge plot that, one presumes, will go into more detail than anyone really needs.

These systems exist because Cavia is afraid of its audience. They know that there’s nothing smart about a brawler; all these games have to go on is visceral energy. You walk to the right, you punch, you stab someone in the kidney. Pure anger. No matter how you truss it up, the experience gets boring after a while. There is no arc built in to sustain the player’s emotions, and no real strategy to keep him returning.

Notice, however, that about a decade ago, shooters had a similar problem. They used their time out of the limelight for introspection; to learn about themselves and to grow. If brawlers are ever to make a comeback, their new face will be extrapolated from what made brawlers fun so long ago. With its gang scenario, Beat Down does go some distance toward explaining the action in the old games, or at least making a new sense out of it. So far, those segments feel both enjoyable and strange enough. The danger the game faces is if that action becomes so compartmentalized that the energy disappears in a fog of statistics.

If the game works, it will be on the virtue of its visceral components; not on the systems taped around them like so much bubble wrap. The big question, then, is how much Cavia will bury them by the end.