Man you can lay an ass whipping in this game like the genre has never seen up to this point. Just trucking dudes, swinging them by the ankles, tossing them around like rag dolls. You roll up on a biker gang ready to brawl and the first thing you do is pick up a parked motorcycle and throw it through the whole line of them. Hell yes. This should be where we're starting from in terms of brawlers. This should be the floor.

I like the look a lot - it's primitive in spots but the bold colors and dark outlines appeal to me. Also some of the characters are really fun. There's an excellent cyborg solider and one hell of a final boss fake-out. They end up overreaching a lot when it comes to how some of the fighting against the more unorthodox enemies works, but it's still fun if you have unlimited quarters. I just want to see colorful characters get wrecked. That's all I'm looking for with these games.

I can't decide whether I would have preferred this be a traditional brawler where you actually move through a level instead of the sort of arena-based RENEGADE spiritual sequel that it is. Maybe this is better - less generic. Either way, I'm glad I'm finally into the '90s with this project. Ready for these to start getting good. Or if not good, at least interesting. Or if not interesting, at least weird.

Also: 'Combatribes' is a really funny way to say 'gangs'.

The Combatribes kind of sucks. I see sometimes that people consider this game more worthy of the title Double Dragon 3 than the games that actually got it, and more than anything that just worries me about the quality of those. This is like, not fun at all. It's really slow and choppy (though that may just be a problem with the SNES version), stages are only one screen long without much to see at all, and bosses are really irritating, especially the third boss (some guy named Trash) and the final boss who is just absolutely broken. Also it's like, really ugly? That can't just be me, it just does not look appealing at all regardless of version. Technos' other games that I've seen don't really have this problem, my best guess is that this is their first 16-bit game but I'm not even sure that is the case. Either way, it's ugly. And annoying. Not worth a shot.