The Warriors: Street Brawl
I’m at the near perfect age for a gamer. Old enough to remember Kung-Fu and Double Dragon, and still young enough not to have forgotten them. The classic side scrolling brawler genre hit close to its peak in ’89 with an arcade title that eventually made its way to the SNES as a launch title in ’91: Final Fight. Regardless of the title though, most of these games drew their inspirations from the kung-fu and street fighting movies of the 70’s. Not the least of which was The Warriors.
The cult classic film tells the story of a New York street gang who are wrongly accused of murdering the king of all gang leaders during a truce. The members have to fight their way home from Central Park to Coney Island and end up encountering members of every other gang along the way. The most recent game based on the movie comes from Paramount Digital Entertainment to the Xbox Live Arcade. Unfortunately, The Warriors: Street Brawl gives itself a bloody nose and two black eyes with sluggish controls, horribly cheap enemies and yawn inducing repetition.
I’ll admit, after getting a preview at Comic-Con this year, I was looking forward to reliving my Final Fight glory days, gut-checking and round-housing any street thug that got in my way. Though I’m not a fan of the movie per-se, it seemed like the perfect environment to take the brawl. Throw in knives, baseball bats and 2×4’s and you’ve got yourself a party. Sadly though, these party-goers have already downed a few Quaaludes. Your fighter, one of several characters from the film, has two basic moves, punch and kick, plus a grapple move meant to inflict more close-quarter damage to the enemy, but does more to leave you open to outside attack. You’ve got a block too, but with more than 2 enemies on the screen, their 3-hit-attack pattern will leave you without a window of opportunity to break your block and resume your attack. To make matters worse, if you don’t dispatch enemies fast enough, reinforcements arrive to much fanfare layering on the frustration.
You’ll quickly find that despite how things look, your attacks won’t often line-up to their target, and don’t even think about a dashing attack. Running more like speed-walking and you lose most of your directional control. Your enemies on the other hand, mostly palette swapped stereotypes, will land attacks even from laying face down after a hit. The more successful hits you land without missing increases your multiplier and fills your rage meter. Rage makes your fighter all glowy and deals more damage, but not all that noticeably and does nothing to motivate a player to try and fill the meter. The more rage you have, the more times you can pull off a character specific special move which is crucial to escaping the dog-piles of enemies that show up out of nowhere because you spent more than 30 seconds on one screen.
The levels themselves are suitably dark and are filled with 70’s era items like boom-boxes and gold chains as bonus picks ups that add to your arbitrary points. You’ll find yourself in alleys, city parks, the subway, cemeteries and finally Coney Island. All at night of course. The environments are hard to appreciate because they are so dimly lit, either to set a mood or to cover up any number of other flaws.
If there’s a saving grace, it’s that Street Brawl has cooperative play that these fighters over the years have sorely lacked. 4 players can jump in to share the pummeling. That said, with so many other strikes against the title, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone to actually play with. The title has been out for a few weeks now and we found it impossible to find any online games outside of our own reviewer’s circle to join.
If you’re a big fan of the movie, I suppose 10 bucks (800 MS points) isn’t that much to ask for a little bit of nostalgia. There’s a nice style to the comic-panel style cut scenes that help to progress the story and the music isn’t all that bad, though it seems a little out of place for the 1970’s. Otherwise, this one probably isn’t for you. It’s a shame that Rockstar’s 2005 The Warriors for the original Xbox isn’t playable on the 360, because it was a decent film-to-game translation that does much better justice to the original content. Do yourself a favor. When Luther screams out his iconic “Warriors, come out to plaaaaay!”, stay in and have a bagel.
