Double Dragon Guide

The game begins with you stepping into the kicking shoes of Jimmy Lee’s, and your girlfriend is beaten up and kidnapped by a ruthless crime lord. Outraged at this turn of events, it is your task to fight through a series of dastardly henchmen and rescue your woman. With your top martial arts skills you are indeed a force to be reckoned with, but it is still a good idea to take advantage of the knifes, whips, and baseball bats you can pick up and use against all who get in your way; you can also pick up barrels and boxes to throw at your opponents. Before you can move on to the next part of the level you must take out all of the fiends who block your path, and at the end of each level there is the usual big boss to contend with who will be harder to take down. If you can knock the level one boss off the conveyor belt with one kick, then you can afford to feel a little smug towards fellow retro gamers. Scrolling beat ‘em ups may be simple affairs that just have you moving along smacking groups of thugs in the face, but when they are done right they can be hugely entertaining. Having a second player join you in the fight eases the challenge, but it can still be difficult to get in an attack before the gang members, particularly if they have weapons. Weaving out of their way helps and you’ll quickly find the elbow becomes your most useful move. Get the timing right and you can catch them with it before they are within striking range. This isn’t always a solution, however, as should someone be approaching from the front, you’ll be knocked on your back shortly after catching their chum with an elbow. Also, as the move uses the punch button it can sometimes lead to you picking up a weapon you didn't intend to and consequently getting punched in the back of the head.

There are a few enemy types in the game, but the standard goons largely perform the same, walking up and attempting to punch you before you can attack them. It’s not completely repetitive, however, as should you have two around you, one will grab you from behind to allow the other to attack. Weapons provide further variety and you’ll have to contend with swinging baseball bats, cracking whips and thrown dynamite/knives. These weapons can also be picked up by the heroes, sometimes leading to a race to grab them in order to gain an advantage. Similarly, the likes of oil drums and rocks can be picked up and thrown by either the Lee brothers or the Black Warriors that can be useful for attacks from distance. Apart from weapons and objects, Billy and Jimmy have their fighting skills to draw on in their battle against the gang members. There’s a button to punch and one to kick and should you get close to the criminal types you can knee them in the face or throw them. A jump button is also present, enabling you to perform a jumping kick, but it is also used for two other moves. Pressing kick and jump when grounded will perform a spinning kick, or should you opt for punch and jump, your Lee brother will throw an elbow behind him to take out a would-be attacker. These combinations are helpfully mapped to Switch’s Z buttons allowing you to perform them with ease.

Double Dragon has quite the following (and a well-deserved one too) because it's just a lot of fun to play. The story casts you in the role of martial arts master Billy Lee, on a quest to save his kidnapped girlfriend Marian from the clutches of the Black Warrior gang. The mob has offered a ransom compromise for Marian's safe return, but rather than submit to their wishes Billy instead decides to just take to the streets and beat the snot out of every Warrior punk he comes across. That's the way to go. Additionally, players can wield the weapons that are occasionally dropped by foes, like baseball bats, whips and sticks of dynamite. But that's where things start to get a little weird with this particular edition of Double Dragon -- the weapons you pick up to use only last a short while, and will randomly disappear out of your hands after you've finished felling the foes in the immediate area. A limitation of the programming, perhaps, but whatever the reason you won't be able to enjoy the enemy-pounding power of your favorite blunt object for more than a minute or so before it evaporates.

Another limitation in this version of Double Dragon is in its ability to send enemies out to oppose you. There are never more than two baddies on the screen at any one time; and further, there can never be two different enemies fighting you. If you're facing off against two foes, they will always be of the same type. That oddity, and even the weapon wielding weirdness, can probably be overlooked or forgiven, but the game's one critical compromise is that, through the same programming problems, it can't support two-players simultaneously.

That oversight kind of keeps this from being Double Dragon it's more like "Single Dragon." The major hook of the arcade original was the fact that you and a friend could command Billy and his twin brother Jimmy Lee to fight the Black Warriors at the same time, and it was the first brawler to ever offer that feature. When it was ported down to the NES, though, it lost it. The developers of the day tried to compensate for the compromise by offering two-player alternating play and a Mode B fighting engine, but neither is a substitute for concurrently kicking butt with a buddy.

You can employ the very same cheap tactics to the generic goons that shuffle slowly forth to stop you. It’s easy to trivialize many of the fights just by repeating the same sequence of moves over and over. But this kind of combat is no more enjoyable when dishing it out than receiving it. The only respite is that, like the games that came before it, you can beat Double Dragon 4 in less than an hour, and even with a friend along for the ride that’s about as much time as I wanted to spend with it.Double Dragon is a 20-minute-long game with slightly awkward fighting mechanics, a lot of cheap enemies and pitfalls, and very little replay value once you've beaten it a few times. The newly released Xbox Live Arcade version of Double Dragon does at least toss in a few bells and whistles, like updated graphics, online co-op play, and some tough-to-earn achievements. But most importantly, this is Double Dragon. Those with happy memories of the game ought to find this $5 download worthwhile, though anyone coming to it for the first time is likely to wonder what all the fuss was about.