Urban Reign is fast, furious and holds no punches. Being able to hit 2 enemies at the same time while double kicking the air is sick. This game uses the Tekken engine so comboing off juggles is essential along with grappling your opponents. There are 100 Missions, and the fighting is done in an arena style fashion instead of a belt scrolling affair. Most of the conditions for completing them is to simply defeat all opponents but sometimes they do vary such as dealing damage to a certain body part on an enemy. 1/3 of the game in and you'll get partners for certain missions. If your partner is defeated, you can still complete the mission which is neat but what is even neater is being able to take control of them at any point! Pretty cool! You can also give them basic commands such as zeroing in on an enemy you yourself need help with.

The story is decent. You play as some dude who beats the hell out of people for hire (known as ‘Brawlers’ in the game’s lore) trying to sort out the city from chaos. You are aided by a woman who represents a Chinese organization trying to get piece of the pie. The mayor of this city also tries to tackle this issue by installing security cameras all over. It’s a bit of a conspiracy and the last mission is awesome because it’s a play on the genre’s trope, specifically the 2D era of beat em’ ups. Ironic stuff. Sound and music is sooo good. Lots of ass kicking tracks. Plus, the sounds of bones breaking is bliss. No issues there.

You will not get far into Urban Reign if you are a button masher. The AI is insane, and I beat it on the normal difficulty. You are expected to know all your moves because trust me you will use them. There are moments where the AI can get cheap and an example of this is when they chain grab you with unbreakable throws (this applies only to the tank/grappler characters). The parry counter or 'reflect' as they call it is essential to master. If you don't get good at this, you will die a lot. My advice is to learn to chain your bread-and-butter combo into an SPA art finisher for massive damage.

Urban Reign is not for everyone, and most people probably won't have the patience to finish it. Not trying to make this game sound like it’s the most special piece of software, but it’s just diabolically true to itself.

Also, prepare yourself for Golem.

This is a game that works wonderfully as a co-op experience but as a single player, it is lacking. There are amazing characters and great combos you can do with them but when you play it as a single player, you can't do any of that. In fact, your AI enemies get to do all that cool shit, they literally brutalize you with the sickest moves when given the chance.

First of all, this game is really difficult. I played 88(out of 100 in total) levels on normal difficulty and I still don't know what the hell am I doing at all. Instead of feeling like a badass and comboing the shit out of my enemies, I had to maneuver around constantly and cheese my enemies with some of the cheap attacks. Especially low attacks can be really confusing for AI. Also, you can stun your enemies over and over when you throw them over the wall with your throws or strikes.

The problem is that you can't rely on your parries because their timing are very specific and there is no room for error in this game. Your enemies gang upon you so fast even in the slightest whiff, they constantly try to circle around you and juggle you to death if you make any mistake. You have to consider you spacing and positioning all the time and instead of going for combos and shit, you have to cheese the game unfortunately. That's why you can't stay in close range for long, you always have to run around, take some cheap shots and run back.

Staying in close quarters is not viable not just for group of enemies though, sometimes fighting against a single powerful enemy can be problematic. One of the most annoying parts of the combat is the throws. I finished the damn game and I still couldn't figure out the timing to break the freaking throws. That's why fighting against Jake and Golem was the biggest challenges of the game. After I beat Golem in 1v1 after many many tries, I decided to change the difficulty to easy instead of normal and beat the game that way, so that I can unlock the other modes.

Looks like I'm bitching a lot but the foundation of the game is actually really solid. Animations and movesets are really badass when you manage to pull them off, even though they are straight up ripped off from Tekken. Also, even though AI is ruthless, almost unfair sometimes, it is really impressive. I've never played against such a smart AI in any action game. When you beat a level with your own tactics, you feel the accomplishment.

Also, as I said, this game looks awesome as a local multiplayer beat-em up. Namco really focused on making a diverse and fun as hell local multiplayer experience with all the characters and their cool moves. You can even make a bunch of tag moves given the situation. Just look at this, it looks fun as hell: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vaA8cUXcDh0&ab_channel=MaximilianDood

In short, Urban Reign is for the maniacs that are into tough as nails action games. People say God Hand is difficult, nah dude, this is the real shit right here. If you're one of those psychos, check this one out.

PS: The moves and the animations of the main character feels dull compared the rest of the cast. That's why, it feels really cool to play with characters like Park and Chris in Free Mode after you beat the game.