I'm not familiar with the River City franchise prior to playing RCG, but RCG turned out quite enjoyable.
The pixelated graphics have a lot of charm. The character portraits looks great and the manga cutscene panels used mostly for the boss encounters were very well done.
The whole game is filled with humor from the premise to the dialogue. I got a good laugh out of some of the dialogue that came up. The story is decent and a lot of the humor kept me invested.
The gameplay is actually less like an arcade beat em up game than I expected. It's fairly long for a playthrough at about 5 hours. Part of it is because there's a lot of backtracking and extra side missions to incentivize exploring every area.
There is a RPG system where you can gain exp from defeating enemies and level up. Bonus exp is also awarded from clearing some side missions. The concept is nice here, but I didn't feel I ever got much stronger after leveling up. The stat boost just seems very minor overall.
There's also an equipment mechanic for accessories. Just two slots so there's not a lot of interesting mix and matching. Most of the accessories aren't particularly great either since their effects are low in numbers. Like an increased 5% damage to male enemies. Then there's ones like a 1% of receiving no damage. I guess it's better than nothing, but the overall effect doesn't seem to make much difference for many of them.
I liked how all of the areas are connected which makes it less like an arcade brawler.
One of the highlights is the OST which was surprisingly great. Some of the vocal tracks really stood out.
Overall, pretty fun game and has more content than many beat em up games. There's a NG+ mode with stronger enemies and two secret unlockable characters after beating the game.
The pixelated graphics have a lot of charm. The character portraits looks great and the manga cutscene panels used mostly for the boss encounters were very well done.
The whole game is filled with humor from the premise to the dialogue. I got a good laugh out of some of the dialogue that came up. The story is decent and a lot of the humor kept me invested.
The gameplay is actually less like an arcade beat em up game than I expected. It's fairly long for a playthrough at about 5 hours. Part of it is because there's a lot of backtracking and extra side missions to incentivize exploring every area.
There is a RPG system where you can gain exp from defeating enemies and level up. Bonus exp is also awarded from clearing some side missions. The concept is nice here, but I didn't feel I ever got much stronger after leveling up. The stat boost just seems very minor overall.
There's also an equipment mechanic for accessories. Just two slots so there's not a lot of interesting mix and matching. Most of the accessories aren't particularly great either since their effects are low in numbers. Like an increased 5% damage to male enemies. Then there's ones like a 1% of receiving no damage. I guess it's better than nothing, but the overall effect doesn't seem to make much difference for many of them.
I liked how all of the areas are connected which makes it less like an arcade brawler.
One of the highlights is the OST which was surprisingly great. Some of the vocal tracks really stood out.
Overall, pretty fun game and has more content than many beat em up games. There's a NG+ mode with stronger enemies and two secret unlockable characters after beating the game.