When I was a small child, I remember playing a lot of “beat-em-up” games with my friends. Games such as Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles dominated the night on our NES’s back in the day. This was a great way to get rid of your frustration for whatever reason with a friend as you knock down myriads of enemies as you progress through the various levels. Since that time this genre of games has faded away, that is until recently because there are a lot of “beat-em-up” games coming to a system near you over the next few months. Capcom has released their game entitled Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance to the public and this is one game that should have not left the building. Read on to find out why you need to avoid this game at all costs.

The story for this game goes as follows: five underworld enforcers are framed for murder by the Las Sombras, the powerful Zanetti family. Now these five people must confront gangs, corrupt police officers, and then the Zanetti family themselves in order to avenge and exonerate their names. It is up to the player to take control of one of these five characters in order to get the job done. Are you up to the challenge?

This game sounds really fun in its premise, right? Who doesn’t want to play as an “anti-hero” as they extract vengeance upon the ones who have wronged them? That is what makes movies such as Payback so interesting and great, right? In theory this would make a very fun game to play, unfortunately for gamers, Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance really falls short in the execution of this premise. There are so many things that make this game horrid but for your sake I will limit my ranting to only a few.

First of all, the only challenge in this game that you will face is your patience. I counted five, yes FIVE, “now loading” screens before the player even got to touch the controller for the first time. A change between every cutscene, narrative, or anything gave you a loading screen. To make matters worse each scene lasted only a minute or two tops. This made no sense as there was nothing really taxing on the system or a good plausible reason why these scene’s couldn’t have been combined into one giant one. I left it slide though because it was the beginning of the game and I thought that it would cease. Nope throughout the entire game you will be forced to look at what seems like an infinite amount of these loading screens. What is it loading? Not like the graphics for this game are pushing the system to its limits or anything like that. Needless to say that this is another “beat down” the players must face if they are playing this game.

You might be thinking, well I can deal with the numerous loading screens if the game itself is fun. The short and curt answer to that statement is no, it is not fun in any sense unless you are a fan of repetition. The fighting for this game is mind-numbingly boring. You will have the standard punch, kick, and guard buttons as well as picking up enemy weapons and using during battles. I did like the fact that you can improvise during the fights to pick up objects around the level to use in your battles, but soon enough this became mundane and boring to do. Even when you obtain new moves the game still feels tedious beyond belief as the same mindless drones come and attack you.

Do you like to play games that look horrid? If you answered yes to the following question, Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance is the game that you have been looking for. The game has very little texture use and the textures they do use are very ugly and generic. If you pay attention to each level in the game, you will notice that they are identical, which makes the game feel even more repetitive then it already is. The character models are very uninspired and ugly as well. There are no redeeming qualities in the visual department of this game.

Whoever wrote this game dialog should never be allowed to write anything ever again. Once you start playing the game you will be inundated with the most foul and needlessly offensive dialog that I have seen in a game in a long time. I understand that a lot of games insert language like this, and for the most part it fits within the storyline, this game just throws the language in for just the sake of having profanity. To make matters worse the voice acting is just as crappy. So now you have poor dialog with extremely poor voice acting, the marriage between the two gives birth to a mind numbing, ear-drum busting, annoying experience. The music in this game isn’t any better. Needless to say, if you want to play this game you will be reaching for that mute button quickly.

If you have a friend that you don’t like that much, then invite him to play a versus mode in this game and he will not ask you to play video games at your place anymore. Why put someone else through the agony of playing this game; it is a form of cruel and unusual punishment. Something that should be put into our justice system, if someone does something wrong make them play this game for a few hours and they will be pleading to stop and never do harm ever again.

Beat Down: Fists of Vengeance is rated M for blood, strong language, and violence. It will take up to 1.4MB on your memory card for game saves.

Gameplay: 4.2
Do you like endless repetition and loading screens out the wazoo? Then this is the game for you!

Graphics: 4.2
The graphics are extremely generic and ugly.

Sound: 4.0
The mute button is your friend.

Difficulty: HARD
This game taxes your patience to the extreme. Game flow: Loading Screen, Cutscene, Loading Screen, beat a couple of easy, stupid AI characters, Loading Screen, insert needless profanity during new cutscene, and repeat.

Concept: 4.1
Nope, no new concepts here, except to annoy the player to the point of insanity

Multiplayer: 4.2
Why share this game with other people when you know for a fact that the single player is not fun?

Overall: 4.1
I find it very funny that the name of this game is entitled Beat Down, because this is exactly what the game is, it is a beat down to even attempt to play this game. Needless to say avoid this game like the plague. There is no reason why you need to check this game out, if you are wanting a good “beat-em-up” game then look elsewhere as there are way better games already available on the market.