In celebration of the series 25th anniversary, Double Dragon Neon was released for the Xbox Live Arcade on September the 12th. WayForward Technologies set out to recreate the style and feel of the 80s arcade classic. Think rockin’ tunes, leather vests and gratuitous boobage. Sounds all well and good, until you realize they may have taken it a step too far.

Right off the bat you are introduced to a heaping fistful of misogyny. Street roughians make off with your girl – who is apparently on board with polyandry – and take her away to presumably be indoctrinated into the Ways of the Punk-ass Fool. You begin your quest to get her back on the streets of Righteousublar City (I made that up), and the game slowly holds your hand through the basic and not-so-basic controls. And that’s where the fun stops.


As masochistic as I clearly can be, my “WTF” moments came early and often in Neon. Enemies were plentiful, powerful, and I felt downright puny, desperately roll-dodging away from nearly every threat and spamming power moves just trying to not die. On Normal mode. In level one. Now, one can hardly fault a game for being too difficult, but there are ways of handling the difficulty scale properly.


The design flaw apparent here dives back into my original insinuation that WayForward took this reboot far too literally. Back in the day, the entire idea behind these classic arcade games was to milk every last quarter out of good ol’ Johnny Crew-Cut and his crowd spending their allowances downtown. Instead of making games so appealing that kids would want to come back for more, it was much easier to make games like frickin’ Battletoads so challenging to complete that they would have no choice but to pour in the quarters to even beat the game outright. Correct me if I’m wrong here, but nobody was ever looking for that kind of experience; it was simply all that was offered at the time. And to attempt to resurrect such a lost position in an era of auto-saves and checkpoints just doesn’t meet the mark.


Admittedly, this is a game designed for cooperative play, and the curve is noticeably more shallow when player two hops into the fray. Added elements including life-sharing and tag-team attacks serve to spice up the gameplay a justifiable amount. Much like the game of old, though, two player co-op almost seems necessary to even stand a chance in the later stages without losing a few lives (which, I might add, are given gratuitously in the final level, as if to say: “Here, you’ll be needing these.”)


Alongside the bump in difficulty comes the notoriously low amount of replayability, which is unfortunate for such a short game. I will say this, though – this game is pretty damn funny. The soundtrack is worth mentioning as well – true 80s glamour and pop euphoria composed by the talented Jake Kaufman. Even so, despite unlockable difficulties, special moves and forms, by the time you finish your first playthrough you’re left with a dissatisfying feeling of “Eh”, and next-to-no desire to bump up the difficulty any number of notches. But then again, how should I know – I Baer-ly played it.