Treachery in Beatdown City: Ultra Remix

President Blake Orama has been kidnapped by Ninja terrorists, so it’s up to a handful of heroes to chase down the culprits, save Blake and obviously save the world from these tyrants.
If it sounds like the plot of a 90’s style arcade fighter, you’d be right, but Treachery in Beatdown City changes things up considerably adding strong turn-based rpg elements, to give us a retro side-scrolling beat’em-up with a difference.

As you’ll see from the accompanying screenshots, Treachery in Beatdown City shares a strong resemblance with games like Double Dragon and anyone who checked out my review of Antstream arcade will know I have a fondness for such classic arcade games.

At first glance, I was expecting something similar, but as soon as you start on Beatdown City, it’s pretty clear you shouldn’t approach this like a standard side-scrolling fighter.
You can walk around the “level” (usually a single screen space) and hit A to jab your opponent, but this is generally pointless unless they have limited health and you just need to finish them off.

While keeping an eye on your health, FP (fight points?) and action bar, you’ll need to press X to bring up the command menu, where you can choose to strike, grapple, or use an item.
Each attack will use 1 piece of your action bar, so you’ll generally need to attack when this is full up, more powerful moves also consume more FP, so you’ll need to carefully micromanage your FP points, to ensure you can maximise your attacks.
A simple left-right combo might only use 16-24 FP, but if you want to punch, grapple and then body slam your opponent you’ll need upwards of 37 FP.

Getting to grips with the battle system doesn’t take too long, and as you progress through the early levels, you’ll start to come across enemies who have specific strength and weaknesses, some need quick jabs to wear them down, while others struggle when you’re up close and grappling them before unleashing a more powerful attack.

The selection of enemies is relatively limited and within the first half hour, you’re going to fight the same person multiple times, and then you might find two people you’ve already fought a few times, and have the added bonus of fighting them at the same time. It just feels a little light when you’ve barely played an hour and you lose count of how many times you’ve body-slammed the stealth punk, or slapped ugly John around the chops.

Now don’t get me wrong, some of the greatest arcade fighters have thrown repetitive enemies at us, but when its usually just a handful of enemies at once, and they’re the only thing that feels familiar it ruins the flow a little.

Coming back to the fact you can always revert to smashing the A button to land a few cheap attacks, I started to experiment with manoeuvring around a little more, usually you could use the environment or dumb AI to group enemies to maximise damage, so I thought I’d take a little stroll around the limited screen space, unfortunately that was a bad idea too.
If you try to move away from your opponent, and they attack from behind rather than having the choice to brace, block or counter their attacks, you can only take a slap round the back of the head or turn round to receive one on the chin, likewise, trying to move into range of enemies is near-pointless as you have to be right on top of them to land your own attacks, but they seem to have spaghetti arms that have a much wider reach.
This means it’s usually best to constantly move towards your opponent, take the incoming hits and attack as soon as those action bars and fight points fill up a little.

Back to move selection and you’ll continue getting stronger, giving yourself better options for more powerful combos, meanwhile the enemies are also getting smarter. It won’t be long before they’re countering your moves, which brings us to the next small issue, which is more science than action, with each enemy having a weakness, there’s not really and luck or skill involved, the timing of your hits isn’t critical as those action bars fill up pretty quickly, so the real test, is how much can you remember each enemy’s weakness.

It’s all fairly rudimentary, and what started off as the hope of a fun arcade brawler with RPG elements, soon turned into feeling like repeatedly bashing my head against a brick wall.
Treachery in Beatdown City certainly is unique, but in trying to implement and develop it’s turn-based system, it steps a little too far away from the game it’s trying to be.

Graphically, you’ll see it has that true 90’s vibe and its attempt to replicate the atmosphere of games like Double Dragon is incredibly well done, but here we are in 2023, and that’s it, there’s really nothing beyond the 90’s that stands out.
Pixelated graphics are perfectly fine by me, but there’s a thousand ways you can still make a game feel modern and apart from trying to merge two very different genre’s there’s not much here to make it feel fresh, this is especially true as you get a little further into the game, which I’ll admit was a bit of a struggle, I just didn’t enjoy the constant mental task of remembering if I needed to punch or kick, when all I wanted to do was leave a dent in the guys skull.

Likewise Audio continues with that 90’d feel, the background music suits the game well, and you have your expected punch, kicks, oof’s and ahh’s, but once again, there’s just nothing to make it stand out and feel modern, there’s no voice acting, which makes the constant pop-op dialogues more of a chore to read through, and with so many areas the presentation could have been better, it’s just a shame that it’s missed the mark time and time again.

I’ve obviously been a little critical of Treachery in Beatdown City, because it didn’t connect with me at all, it was more of a glancing blow than landing flush on the cheek, and while I was excited about merging turn based with real-time action, the delivery felt too isolated, and in trying to be a turn-based game, it’s failed in just about every area as an arcade fighter.

However Ultra Remix adds 9 new levels, more ranged combat and 80+ new enemies, so there’s definite improvements as you progress, if you can tolerate the less desirable main game for 2-3 hours beforehand. There’s no doubt it’ll have some fans, but having not played the original release, it’s hard for me to really enjoy what’s on offer.

While I can understand some enjoying the broken flow of turn-based fighting, when trying to play as an action game, it’s obviously not going to please everyone, so it’s fair to say if you’re a big fan of more turn based than real-time, it could well be worth checking out, and anyone who did enjoy the original is likely to appreciate this Ultra remix.
Treachery in Beatdown City: Ultra Remix is alleged to add at least 2-3 times the content of the original pointing towards about a 10 hour game, the rrp is $29.99 which for me, just doesn’t offer enough value to make up for its shortcomings.

Unfortunately, Treachery in Beatdown City is trying too hard to be both a turn-based and real-time fighting game and ultimately fails to deliver the final blow in either class.

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