River City Girls was a lockdown game for my partner and myself, keeping our spirits up through the drudgery the pandemic with awesomely self-aware writing, sassy co-protagonists, and old-school yet well executed beat-em-up combat in the freely explorable setting of River City. I played plenty of beat-em-ups during that time–Streets of Rage 4, Scott Pilgrim, Mother Russia Bleeds, to name a few, as well as some of the 90s classics.

Some of those games offered smoother combat while others thrived in their excesses of brutality, but through all that River City Girls emerged as my favourite through its sheer force of personality, which is so often lacking in this inherently old-school genre. This game had serious character, stemming from its sassy co-protagonist pairing of high school girls, Misako and Kyoko.

River City Girls 2 feels like a frugal kind of sequel; the art style, key characters, enemy designs, several songs from the soundtrack, and many of the shop merchants are reused; some of the bosses even reuse some of the boss moves (and accompanying animations) from the original game. That in itself is kind of fine, and with the map’s expansion and a decent selection of new music, enemies, and moves thrown in, there’s just about enough novelty here to justify the sequel, but don’t expect to be blown away by the amount of new content.

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The far bigger concern is that while the sequel has taken a few baby steps forward from its predecessor, on a technical level it’s an alarming leap backward. At the time of writing, River City Girls 2 has an utterly screwy frame rate situation where menus, in-game objects, and effects run at 60 fps, while the characters themselves (y’know, the important part you actually control and interact with) run at a horrible 30 fps. It’s all the more baffling given that this game is visually identical to the original, which ran at a steady 60 throughout. While I’m hopeful this will be fixed, it’s bizarre that the game would be released with a basic technical shortcoming that makes it feel significantly worse than the original game.

So I write this review giving some benefit of doubt, because beneath this one woeful slab of technical cludge is a solid beat-em-up that KOs its competition through its excellent writing and presentation. Even though this is basically ‘More Misadventures Of Kyoko and Misako’ where the girls inadvertently find themselves prying the titular city from the Yakuza’s control just because they closed their favourite video game store down, their excellent dynamic makes that absolutely fine. The assertive rough-and-tough Misako and ditsy, derpy Kyoko play off each other–and River City’s other strange denizens–brilliantly, with story and dialogue neatly expressed through visual novel-style static scenes and black-and-white comic strips for the flashbacks. Humour’s obviously a subjective thing, but this game has it in spades.

The assertive Misako and ditsy Kyoko play off each other–and River City’s other strange denizens–brilliantly

River City Girls 2 continues to follow the broad design blueprint of its parent series, River City Ransom. That means you have free exploration of the city, which is divided into several districts, each of which has its own map made up of multiple different zones. This sequel leans into the side-quests a little more, letting you run errands for the various comically written oddballs around town. When you’re not punching and kicking your way through the streets, you’ll be doing strange side activities like collecting tarot cards for a skeleton you meet in a graveyard, taking on a gang of kids in a game of Dodgeball or, for some gods-unknown reason, taking selfies around town for the creepy stalker kid you keep bumping into. Yes, the game definitely has those elements of anime weirdness–creepy dudes, the titular girls striking all kinds of suggestive poses in visual novel-style static cutscenes–but its self-awareness means that it never gets too leery. Misako and Kyoko may be high school girls, but they can handle themselves in this world of weirdos.

There are plenty of secret and optional areas to discover in the city, as well as shops and dojos where, true to the River City games of old, you can improve your stats RPG-style and learn new moves in exchange for money you pick up off the countless people you beat up in the streets. This of course means you can grind to improve your character if you want. While for the most part the game doesn’t require it, there are a few harsh difficulty spikes (and a couple of really chaotically designed boss encounters) that may prompt you to respawn at Kyoko’s house and work on your skills a bit before giving certain challenges another shot.

Naturally, the open-exploration format leads to a bit more back-and-forth and map-checking than the tighter mission-based format of Streets of Rage or TMNT: Shredder’s Revenge. Thankfully, bus stops around town offer a well-integrated form of fast travel, and the freedom to pursue side-quests or find secret locked doors that you can come back to later gives the game a nice ‘do it on your own terms’ flow. Finding the game too hard? Hit the streets, make some dough, and buy candy and sushi rolls to boost your stats. If you’re finding things too easy, then bring out one of the lower-level characters instead (or just crank up the difficulty).

The combat itself expands a little on its predecessor’s. It’s still beat-em-up 101 stuff. You block, you grab, you learn a growing number of combos and special attacks, and you do those all-important lane leaps by dodging up and down the screen. Each character’s moveset is unique, with animations and attacks that feel appropriate to each one. Misako’s moves are a bit more brawly, while Kyoko… well, let’s just say that her special move is the famous Fortnite ‘Dab.’ Provie’s a particularly interesting one, as her breakdancing moves flow into each other in often spectacular ways.

There’s even an almost Pokemon-style collect-em-all element, as you can spare enemies who plead with you, employing them into your service. You can then call them in for cooldown-based one-off attacks. Back at Kyoko’s house, the girls’ home hub, all your ‘caught’ NPCs are standing in your kitchen, and you can choose which two to bring out (or pay $25 to hire more unique muscle, like a chubby chap with pink boxing gloves or–my personal favourite–a beefcake dad with a baby in one of those chest straps).

While the combat is as deep as it needs to be for a game like this and introduces plenty of neat ways to juggle enemies (the ol’ ‘hit your enemy high into the air for your partner to jump up, grab them, then piledrive them into the ground never gets old), it does feel a bit on the stiff side–like a beat-em-up made in 1995 rather than 2022. While this no doubt isn’t helped by the current 30 fps limitations, I do think that the game’s mechanics aren’t quite precise enough for the awkward platforming sequences contained therein. Depth perception was always a nightmare in beat-em-ups, and there are a few too many points where River City Girls 2 falls foul of that, forcing you to make jumps over gaps that are incredibly hard to gauge.

It’s a little disappointing, and really quite surprising, that River City Girls 2 shows very little impetus to improve on its promising predecessor. The girls have still definitely ‘got it,’ and still make this colourful and characterful journey worth it through some rough patches, but there’s a little too much reliance on the assets of the original to make it feel worth the rather steep asking price. The original game made a fan of me, while the sequel just about manages to sustain my loyalty, though that will definitely be affected by how WayForward deal with its woeful frame rate issue in the coming weeks.

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