Review by: Brian Rowe

When the streets are drenched in crime, the best cops don’t wait for due process and untimely warrants. Look at John McClain, Dirty Harry, or Sgt. Riggs. They were walking vessels of musky testosterone that, jurisdiction be-damned, cleaned the cesspools with rigid biceps and magnum power. Lewis Cannon would have been a movie-idol of the ‘80s with his feathered hair, white suit, and grab-bag of one-liners. Too bad this isn’t the place for retro-reviews.

I was practically born with a roll of quarters in my pocket, preternaturally primed for the likes of Double Dragon and Final Fight. Old-school beat-‘em-ups will forever have a special place in my heart, but not always for their lasting appeal. Like the awkward memories of teenage romance and my first girlfriend, some things are meant to be learned from and left in the past. Nowadays, holding out my fist and hoping that someone runs into it doesn’t quite cut it in the action department. Umm… I’m talking about games, not girls.

Somehow, Tokyo Beat Down and its stiff, simple system of button-mash attacks evaded the 12 years of progress instigated by Die Hard Arcade. It’s a blind-swinging slug-fest filled with a palette-swapped cast of cheap, leg-sweeping gangsters and Molotov-chucking hoodlums, and little recourse to thwart their two-way flanks (wow, that was a lot of hyphens). It’s not uncommon to get charged from off-screen, tripped, and then set ablaze upon standing. It’s an unapologetically cruel and unavoidable scenario.

You might be thinking, “This guy doesn’t know what he’s talking about. Doesn’t he know what a beat-‘em-up is?” On the contrary, I consider myself a bit of a connoisseur, and Tokyo Beat Down doesn’t have the chops to cut it. The movements of attacking, blocking, and pulling out your limited-use gun are tightly constrained to their cycles of blurry animation. Hold block a millisecond before a punch animation has finished and nothing happens. Vice versa, punching or kicking in the window between releasing block and before Cannon’s arms have fully relaxed activates health-depleting special moves, of very questionable use.