Review: Double Dragon Gaiden’s Roguelite Features Drag the Game Down

Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise of the Dragons once again sees the Lee Brothers punching out crime in the streets of New York City. This time, you don’t need a second person to bring both brothers to the fight, either (although a pal never hurts). With the ability to swap between two chosen characters (with many more you can unlock), you’ll have plenty of options as to who will join you on your crusade to mangle troublesome gangs. Mixing this with some roguelite features and the ability to gain restorative items by doing well in combat, it sounds like a solid return for Bimmy Billy and Jimmy. Unfortunately, while it’s a decent game, the franchise once again fails to find the greatness of its past.

Delving into the past, the game follows an early excursion for the Lee Brothers. The world has been ravaged by nuclear war, and four gangs have risen from the ashes to bicker over New York City. The brothers get dragged into it when the mayor brings an injured Marian to their dojo. Thankfully, she quickly recovers and joins the fray along with Billy and Jimmy. Well, if you pick her as your tag partner, that is.

You get a choice of two characters you can use throughout Double Dragon Gaiden. You start off with the Lee brothers, Marian, and Uncle Matin. They all play a little bit differently, with Billy being a bit more defensive, Jimmy focusing more on offense, Marian giving you access to firearms, and more (especially when you start unlocking the new characters). It’s a nice idea to be able to round out a play style by doing something like pairing Jimmy’s offensive capabilities with someone who can attack from a distance like Marian.

Image via Secret Base

You’ll want to be clever about your choice of fighters since this game incorporates roguelite elements. If you get stomped in your journey to clean up the streets, you’ll be kicked all the way back to the start of the game. To counter this new level of challenge, you’ll be using in-game cash you stock up to unlock upgrades between levels. These will give you more health, make you move faster, or make certain moves do more damage. You can cater your picks to your play style to help you stay in the fight. That same cash can be used to revive fallen characters if you still get beaten despite your choice of upgrades.

However, that cash can also be turned in for Tokens that let you buy special items like new characters and artwork. If you’re itching to unlock a new playable character (HINT – buy Abobo ASAP), you’re going to want to push yourself to play well. You can even skip buying an upgrade for a cash bonus at the end of most stages, too, so you can take some big risks for potential big Token rewards while playing Double Dragon Gaiden. You still get to turn in your cash for Tokens even if you die, though, so at least your risks will kind of pay off no matter how well your run goes.

Now, if you’re not feeling too keen on dying permanently, you are free to tweak the game’s challenge level. The game begins with a screen filled with modifiers that let you adjust your health, the price of reviving, upgrade costs, and even enemy aggression. With each decrease in difficulty, the price of those reward Tokens goes up. If you make it harder, the price goes down. If you want those secrets, you may want to push yourself to make things more challenging.

Image via Secret Base

That said, you may not want to rush into getting yourself beat down. Double Dragon Gaiden can get quite challenging in a hurry, and not necessarily in ways that feel fun or fair. Even with the difficulty cranked way down, foes will stomp you flat after a few screw-ups once you’re a few stages into the game. If you don’t prioritize health power-ups between levels, you might run out of money from revives before you’re anywhere near the end of the game.

This difficulty feels fairly inflated for a number of reasons. For starters, the characters all play a bit stiff at the start. If you try to jump out of danger, it takes a moment before you lift off the ground. Many characters have combos where they will pause for an irritating amount of time before they do the final strike. Some of your special attacks have long windups. The game loves to throw huge numbers of foes after you, so if you haven’t stun locked everyone on-screen with your attacks, you’re probably going to get thumped from behind while you’re waiting for your special move to go off or your combo to finish. This happens a lot.

Seeing as you take so much damage, you might feel that this is what the roguelite upgrade elements are for in Double Dragon Gaiden. These do steadily upgrade your character, but you only get one choice per level, and the increases feel fairly marginal most of the time. Upgrading health several times almost feels like a waste given how quickly enemies tear through your life. Damage upgrades feel solid as they kill enemies faster, but leave you vulnerable to getting hit since you aren’t increasing your health. Increases in movement speed feel almost negligible. There are a few power-ups that feel worthwhile in specific situations, but a fair amount of them just don’t seem worth taking.

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There’s another mechanic to keep you alive, though. Each character has special attacks they can do when you have a certain amount of Special Meter. These are their more spectacular strikes that tend to kill foes quickly. Any foe you hit with these drops more money, so you really want to be using these moves a lot (and the bar fills quickly so you usually can). If you hit at least three foes with a special attack, they’ll drop a healing food item. If you can catch four or five enemies, you get greater healing things. This encourages you to constantly use those special moves to keep making enemies drop healing goodies and increase your cash flow.

Because of the unbalanced nature of the combat in Double Dragon Gaiden, it feels like that’s all you’re doing throughout the game. I spent the entirety of my playthrough kiting enemies toward one another so I could catch them with the Special Moves so that I would always have a healing item on the screen. And since that’s also the best source of money, I would continue to lure enemies into groups to smash them to pieces. While it feels pretty fun to kill five enemies at once, it feels counter-intuitive to spend so much time luring enemies around in a beat ’em up instead of just getting in their faces and hitting them.

Hitting those big groups probably got annoying because the whole game grinds to a halt every time you do it. If you nail one of those big groups, a splash screen pops up with a picture of your combo number and the food you’re getting, all while congratulations are shouted at you. This happens EVERY SINGLE TIME you hit a group larger than two, so it constantly boots you out of your flow in combat. The interruption doesn’t last long, but when it’s happening every few seconds, it gets old incredibly fast.

Image via Secret Base

Furthermore, grabbing food comes with its own dangers in Double Dragon Gaiden. You have to hit a button to grab your food from the ground. This is great for when you want to save food until you’re injured. However, this is the same button as your character’s slower alternate moves. As an example, this activates Jimmy’s slow, extremely vulnerable grab animation. So, what usually happens is I try to grab some food, am not perfectly lined up with it, and instead go into an animation that is likely to get my character slapped around. Not really what you want to happen when you’re at low health trying to snag a healing item.

All of this might be forgivable if combat looked and felt good, but it’s okay at best. Smacking enemies around can feel pretty nice with some of the cast’s basic attacks, capturing that pleasant beat ’em up feel. However, some of them, like Billy’s flailing, shin-high kick feel laughable until you get a combo going. Your special abilities can also be pretty flashy, as each character has several to choose from (although they’re varying in usefulness, so I usually found myself only using one clear best move with each character). The sound effects for hitting your foes feel all right, but lack that sense of real impact that really makes a beat ’em up pop. It’s all fine, but very little in the combat felt better than that.

Some neat attacks can’t save the art style in Double Dragon Gaiden, though. While the movements are smooth, there’s something off about the strange big headed-characters. They look a bit too goofy for my own tastes, which stole some of the enjoyment out of the martial arts combat. The enemies have some decent variety to them, but you quickly start seeing a whole lot of same-ish foes throughout your journey. Each stage tends to give your enemies a new look unique to that level, but the enemy behaviors and attacks feel fairly similar. Every fight quickly feels pretty much exactly the same after only a few levels. Especially when combined with the need to always use your Special Attack to constantly get food to stay alive. Each fight just involves kiting slightly different looking enemies around, avoiding them the exact same way, until you get them close together for your special. Repeat this until you die or the game ends.

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This game feels like it couldn’t quite manage to find a solid hook for its action, and is mainly a pile of systems that just aren’t satisfying. To justify having the roguelike cash/token system, enemies were made to deal more damage and your natural moveset was nerfed. Those roguelite upgrades you’re saving for don’t really change anything appreciable in the game. You don’t get better moves or neater attacks, but rather just tweaks to numbers. So, combat feels stilted and lacking to support an upgrade system that doesn’t feel like it adds anything special to combat. And since combat was made harder to support this roguelite system, it had to be balanced with a reliance on special moves. This results in feeling like you HAVE to do the exact same move over and over and over again to survive.

And all of this exists just to support a crummy system of upgrades. Well, those and the Tokens, and there’s not really a whole lot you can buy with them in Double Dragon Gaiden. You can unlock nine new characters that do have some fun new play styles, but they’re the only good thing to get. You’re able to buy hints, artwork, and music, but while the tunes are pretty good, this stuff isn’t terribly interesting to buy unless you’re utterly loving this game. Mostly, beyond the new characters, there’s just not much worth buying, which makes the tokens useless in a hurry.

All of this said, it is still a fun game as something you pick up and goof off with for a while. However, as I was playing it after spending some time with Final Fight, King of Dragons, Double Dragon Neon, and Turtles in Time, it just doesn’t measure up. The weak art style, reliance on kiting, the unbalanced damage, the dull upgrade system, and constant interruptions made me crave my time with all of those other games. It’s fun, but nothing about it ever makes it feel special or impressive. While competent, it’s not something that is going to blow people away.

Double Dragon Gaiden is available now on the Nintendo Switch, PS4, PS5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.