REVIEW: ‘Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise Of The Dragons’ Kicks Butt (PC)

Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise of the Dragons is a co-op beat ’em up developed by Secret Base and published by Modus Games and Joystick. It’s the year 199x, and Billy and Jimmy Lee have to team up with some friends to take on the city’s gangs. Tag in and out with two different playable characters or play together with a friend in this simple but challenging and highly replayable experience.

Double Dragon Gaiden is quite simple as far as its mechanics go. You have some basic attack combos and three kinds of special moves per character. Using these few moves, you’ll take on hoards of enemies across four stages. Different enemies have different kinds of attacks and varied best ways to approach defending against them, too, so you won’t simply be button-mashing your way through the game. In fact, despite the easy controls, the difficulty spikes quite hard the deeper into the game you get, especially as you face off against some of the game’s rather tough bosses. Figuring out the best combos, moments to use specials (especially because you get health pickups if you take out multiple enemies with one special move), and ways to dodge attacks is neither straightforward nor the same across different enemy types.

However, if you’re finding the game too easy or too hard, Double Dragon Gaiden has an absolutely excellent and nuanced difficulty selection menu. Before you boot up a new game, you get to select several sliding scales for enemy health, player health, enemy aggression, damage, number of lives, and other modifications that can either help or hurt your playthrough. The incentive to pick higher difficulties is that you’ll earn more tokens faster, which can be spent between runs to unlock more characters, as well as other collectibles. The higher the difficulty, though, the higher the cost of extra lives during your run, which requires spending money picked up throughout every level.

The give and take of this rewards system incentivize you to keep pushing yourself to try harder difficulties, which requires driving yourself to learn better defensive and offensive tactics in the game. It also incentivizes you to replay the game over and over or, even more importantly, makes it feel okay to quit and start over on an easier difficulty if you get stuck. You don’t lose out terribly hard on rewards, and the game isn’t all that long to make a redo feel like a tall task.

The other incentive for replaying the game several times over besides unlocking new characters is that the four levels get longer the later into a playthrough you encounter them. Each level has up to three stages, and the first level you choose will only run you through the first stage, the second through the first two, and the third and fourth through all three. The final level you pick will include a harder version of that level’s final boss, so you can only face all four true bosses if you play the game repeatedly.

I struggled with the difficulty scale sometimes, finding that some of the move startups and lack of I-frames made gameplay aggravating at higher difficulties. The double jeopardy of chain attacks with no way to get out of them was frustrating. It was fun experimenting with different characters, from the first four to the various unlockables. Each has a distinct move set, advantages, and disadvantages. I quickly picked favorites, but it was still fun playing around with different approaches to the game. Artistically, the game looks and sounds solid. The retro feel is everywhere and always sharp.

Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise of the Dragons is a super solid beat ’em up with a steep learning curve but a lot of options to adjust the difficulty and help incentivize replay.

Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise of the Dragon is available on PC, Xbox, PlayStation, and Nintendo Switch.