Super Double Dragon (SNES) review "The Dragon Roar Irritates"

I'm not as to why, but I have never been able to get any satisfaction on playing the first entry of the series on SNES. Sure, the graphics are stupendous, the sound even better and have a myriad of moves at your disposal to try on thugs but then you start playing the game and its just so unforgiving even at the beginning of it. Its just cuts the fun that you would experience with early titles and can't really get any enjoyment from it.

To say that you just need practice on it would be a false sense of conformity. To begin with there is no options mode to speak of before beginning a game. There's not even a cheat code programmed into it to try and dig more into it than the assigned difficulty that has been cemented into the cartridge. This is pretty bad being that every enemy here tries to take advantage of anything you try and do, from blocking attacks to punch you out of the air when trying to perform a jump kick. Enemies will also become quite obnoxious when keeping their distance and land a cheap hit on you before you get a chance to confront them. All of this combined with said enemies surrounding you and giving you little space to counter their attacks can turn your mood quite ugly in mere moments.

Yes, you have the ability to block and counter attacks but this does little when fending against two or more enemies when you are trying to maneuver around on a screen that refuses to remain still while dealing with anything. Usually the screen will only move after you defeat a set number of opponents before letting you know you can advance through the stage, but seemingly here you could keep walking all the way till the end without much problem, being that as soon as you wander at the edge the game pushes you forward. This is just a terrible mechanic when you are currently engaged in combat and your character is pushed away to give enemies an opening.

Another faulty factor on Super Double Dragon is just how much health your character loses when being hit. When a thrown knife caught me it took away almost HALF of my health! That is brutal. Why set up such a large bar of health when it can be depleted in a few hits?

The game seems to lack any type of story within gameplay as your progress through it, every mission just ends and you are set on the next one, most of them even without proper boss fights. This seems to be a missing element on the game and its quite noticeable. I know that by now it has been stated that there was a story set up along with cutscenes to help you guide through better, but when you start playing this game without knowing such things it just throws you off. You would reach the last boss and that would pretty much it. The Lee brothers just deciding to go out kicking ass without much of a thought.

I want to give this game a whole lot more credit than what I could give because I DO like it and I WANT to like it further but it feels like an incomplete experience and too tough for me to continue giving it any more of a chance than I already had tried to. It is quite challenging but when AI takes advantage of anything you try to do it just feels unfair and quite unplayable. Perhaps you could get a better time if a buddy joins in to have your back, but as a single game you could end up just placing the controller down after losing your last life and play something else.

Community review by CptRetroBlue (July 26, 2020) A bio for this contributor is currently unavailable, but check back soon to see if that changes. If you are the author of this review, you can update your bio from the Settings page.