Rushing Beat X: Return of Brawl Brothers

Classic beat-em-up series like Streets of Rage and Double Dragon saw several revivals in the 21st century, so why not Rushing Beat? Japanese publisher City Connection owns the rights to Jaleco’s properties and have been keeping them in circulation, so it was only a matter of time. This fourth entry is an interquel, taking place between Brawl Brothers and The Peace Keepers. It also tries its best to unify the naming terminology between the American and Japanese releases by using the “Return of Brawl Brothers” subtitle, still ridiculous since there are two female team members.

The story focuses on a new character named Kahlua, a teenage girl with tanned skin and blonde hair who’s lost her memory and begins training at Rick Norton’s gym. The main bad guy is Edgar Dieter, brother of Iceman from Brawl Brothers, who’s using his scientific brain genius to create an army of zombies, clones, and other mutations to take over Neo-Cisco. The game begins with Kahlua, Rick, and Bild as playable characters, and you unlock the rest through the first several levels, including Lord J, Wendy, and Kazan. There are four difficulty levels, with the expert level Shura difficulty providing the biggest challenge. There’s also a Free Play mode which skips the story and gives challenges to beat in each area.

Rushing Beat X builds on the Final Fight-style mechanics of its 16-bit forebears, with added emphasis on quick action and combos. Each character has a few basic combos plus stronger uppercuts and other attacks. The combo and juggling system is very flexible, allowing you to cancel out of attacks by either jumping or dashing, allowing you to build up long strings. Between the six main characters, there’s a good mix between “strong but slow” and “fast but weak”, but even the bulkier characters still have snappy movement. One of the moves even launches the enemy in the air then lands them head first in the ground, with their body sticking straight up like a plank, allowing you to score extra hits.

You also have a Rage Gauge, which builds up as you take damage. You can execute Beat Blows in exchange for one-third of this bar, which blows back enemies but doesn’t do much damage, similar to the Guilty Gear games. When it’s full, you’ll automatically enter Rage Burst mode further increasing your strength. While activated, you can also execute a Rush Finish super combo, which is your character’s strongest attack.

Weapons are divided into two classes. Larger weapons, like steel beams and flamethrowers, override your attacks and disappear after a few uses, like in most other beat-em-ups. However, smaller weapons like tire irons and grenades are stored in your inventory and can be used at any time, though these also have a limited number of uses. There’s also a unique food system – most food items are also stored in your inventory and can be used at any time. However, whenever you visit the food truck that regularly pops up, you can use these food items as ingredients for combo sets, drastically reducing their price. You can also purchase weapons here, though money is relatively scarce so it’s better to use the cash for food.

Rushing Beat X ditches the 2D visuals of the SNES games in favor of cartoon shaded 3D models, in the vein of Marvel vs. Capcom 3. While the shadows are a little overdone, it’s a nice look for a game that obviously doesn’t have a high budget. The guitar-heavy soundtrack was composed by WASi303, though it doesn’t make much of an impression.

The game also takes its lore very seriously, with interlevel comic book-style cutscenes laying out Dieter’s plans, complete with little snapshots of the SNES games, in case you forgot specific events from the old days. But the story is about as generic as you can expect from a beat-em-up, as you go through several areas of a city and then infiltrate a secret base. These are all skippable but it’s hard to imagine anyone cares much about Brawl Brothers lore.

But the game does have a cheeky sense of humor – there’s a concert in a park where zombies break out a dance that’s basically taken from Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”, with characters even referencing its questionable legality, and there’s a running joke with all of the ridiculous ways your food truck can meet you halfway through a level for item refreshes. There are also plenty of Jaleco references, including an evil pharmaceutical corporation named with the anagram Jecoal, and a few Ninja Jajamaru-kun mentions. Your food truck is named “Tough Enough” (the correct spelling of the SNES fighting game Tuff E Nuff) and you’ll find terms like Rival Turf graffitied over the place. It even regularly references 64th Street, bringing Jaleco’s arcade beat-em-up into the Rushing Beat lineage.

Rushing Beat X might have a strong brawling system, but the game is pretty long, with a full playthrough taking two hours. That’s not a problem on its own, especially since the game saves between levels, but the nine stages are also very lengthy, repeating areas until long after they’ve worn themselves out and recycling enemies over and over. There aren’t many enemy types, and boss variety is sorely lacking. Due to all of the scientific shenanigans, you’ll fight various “zombie” or “dark” versions of various characters, including the Rushing Beat team. You’ll also regularly fight Julia, Edgar’s personal maid who’s also a killing machine. Along with Kahlua, she is the coolest new character in the game, and she becomes playable after beating it, but she only uses her battle swimsuit outfit instead of her more unique maid outfit.

While you only have a single life, the game also offers unlimited credits, which kinda undermines the food system. You can try to 1CC it, but considering its two-hour length, that’s a little exasperating. This issue was a solved problem in Streets of Rage 4, which refreshed your lives every stage but forced you to restart the level if you ran out, which kept up the challenge without just giving you infinite credits. So it’s a bit disappointing City Connection didn’t try to balance Rushing Beat X like this. The enemies are also split between (literal) mindless zombies that amble around aimlessly and act more like fodder, and tougher enemies that can easily stunlock you and sap half your life meter.

Rushing Beat X is a decent revival, certainly besting its 16-bit counterparts. And from both a mechanical and graphical standpoint, it’s better than Double Dragon Revive, another retro revival beat-em-up from a few months earlier. Despite its best efforts, it still can’t shake that “second tier Final Fight clone” reputation it always had, though it’s still very good at what it is.