Double Dragon Trilogy was a game I bought months ago from
GOG having had an email from them promoting the game. I remembered enjoying it
when I played it on my mate Adam’s NES years ago, bought it on a whim and it’s
taken me until now to give it a go. I dug my old controller out, booted up the
game, remembered how hard it was and hoped that this time I’d be able to beat
it. You should be aware that these notes refer to this updated version of the
game.
The premise of the game is that you’re one of a pair of
twins, Billy and Jimmy Lee, and you’re on a quest to fight through a street
gang called the Black Warriors to save Billy’s girlfriend, Marian. The game is
one of the earlier efforts of what later became known as the Brawler genre,
with your character able to move around the floor section of the screen,
kicking, punching and special-moving your way through the levels and the
enemies. The game was originally released in 1987 and the genre was very
popular in the arcades at the time, but is it still any good today?
That’s a loaded question if you’re asking me, because I will
always compare a game like this to the standards of Streets of Rage 2, which is
the best game of all time and everyone should play it. But as a game released
roughly five years before that, Double Dragon does OK. It’s a standard brawler
with some new features (for the time) and satisfying game mechanics, let down
at the end by a horribly cheap final level, (we’ll get to that.) You have a
button to punch, a button to kick and one to jump as well. You can also to a
jump kick, but I got through the game without doing this because Billy kept
kicking backwards. I didn’t find out until later that you’re supposed to press
the punch button to make him kick forwards!
 |
| Batter him... |
The enemies usually go down after one or two attack combos,
and there are some colourful characters and bosses to liven things up. Double
Dragon was also the first game of its kind to allow the use of weapons, which
added an extra layer of depth as you have to balance range, speed and timing.
The whip, for example, was a fast weapon but didn’t have a lot of range,
whereas the baseball bat was slower but had more reach. Both required good
timing. The knife was a throwing weapon, which would one-shot kill most of the
lower-level enemies and help a lot with a boss. You could also throw boulders,
boxes and barrels.
Aside from being able to select the difficulty (I went with
easy; games like this often require you to know them inside out to be able to
handle the harder difficulties,) the Trilogy version comes with two modes –
Arcade and Story. It took me a couple of goes to work out the difference: In
Arcade mode you play through the game, you have three lives and can continue
when you’ve lost them all. In Story mode, you can select any of the game’s four
levels once unlocked, starting the game with four lives and no continues. I
beat the game on Arcade mode. I did try the story mode but found it very
difficult, and here’s why:
Remember that horribly cheap final level a couple of
paragraphs ago? This purports to be the gang’s hideout in some kind of temple.
The first half of the level is trapped with sliding blocks and spear statues
that drain a lot of your energy, and with the blocks in particular there seems
to be nothing you can do about it. They appear in a random pattern as soon as
you get close to them, and will kill you after two hits. There’s no skill
involved with this, just luck, and you’ll lose a lot of your lives navigating
it. Then there is the game’s final boss, Willy, whose weapon is a gun that will
one-shot kill you the moment it hits you and will never be dropped. It is
possible to beat him, but without the option to continue the game once you’ve
lost your lives, it presents a far greater challenge than is fun.
Once you’ve beaten the game, Billy rescues his girlfriend
and the credits roll. Apparently if you play in multiplayer mode you then have
to fight Jimmy for her affections, but as I played this game on my laptop, I
doubt I’ll ever see this! All in all, it’s not a bad little game, I had some
fun with it, despite the last level. Give it a go – but don’t spend any
substantial amount of money on it!
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