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Tokyo Beat Down is a side-scrolling beat-'em-up for the Nintendo DS which seeks to mimic the glory of days gone by on the SNES and Genesis in games like Final Fight and Streets of Rage. Players assume the roles of three different police officers stationed in Tokyo who work together in a unit to fight crime: the hard way. The title they've earned themselves is "The Beast Cops" because of the way they brutally take down criminals.
The gameplay is very old school: you move from left to right, punching and kicking your way through everything that gets in your face. Crushing barrels and phone booths reveals food and guns, just like you'd expect in real life. The controls are generally simple: punches are one button and kicks are another. There are some other things that make use of other buttons, such as jumping -- which seems by and large purposeless in this game as there are hardly ever any obstacles to jump over and no special attacks executed while jumping, near as I could tell.
In general, Tokyo Beat Down suffers from a number of technical problems: combat just doesn't feel solid, hit detection is a little bit loose, firing guns and blocking is extremely unwieldy and slow (namely because you must use the shoulder buttons and it feels delayed rather than instant), boss battles are (aside from one comical exception) generally bland and uninteresting...Enemy design and AI hardly changes at all throughout the game offering little to mix things up...All in all, Tokyo Beat Down, as a game, is kind of mediocre. Tokyo Beat Down, as an experience, however, is definitely worth checking out, because its writing is superb.
When I say the writing is good, I mean that it will make you cry: because you'll find yourself laughing so hard. The scenes between levels and sometimes during them are as a whole smartly written and localized and really do an excellent job at capturing the nonsensical comedy of buddy cop films, and the game just runs with it, going out of its way to not take itself seriously -- and even when it does, it's so over the top it's just a spoof anyway. The main character's name is Lewis Cannon, if that is any indication of the game's style. Every other aspect of the presentation is fine, from the Genesis-inspired musical score (which can get a bit repetitive, admittedly) to the simplistic 3D graphics. The presentation is fine, the combat is a bit loose, but the writing is really what makes for a memorable experience.
