Okay so, I had no idea who Bud and Terence even were before I got this game.
And before you call me an idiot for that, no I didn't buy the game on its own for no reason, I'm not that stupid.
I actually got this game included in a beat 'em up bundle I got a while back! It just so happened to include this and the sequel among a bunch of other games I was more interested in so I figured I'd take them.

Anyway! Playing this without much exposure to the actors was a bit odd, to say the least. Played through it with a friend and it actually got us to end up watching They Call Me Trinity together almost immediately after we finished it, for context. And it was a pretty fun time, even if it's not like... the best western I've ever watched or whatever.


Anyway!
The game itself kinda gives off a "passionate but unpolished" vibe overall.

The pixel art visuals are INCREDIBLY good, and even mix in some very well blended-in 3D elements for extra detail, fltered to fit almost seamlessly with all the 2D stuff around them. Detailed environments, smooth animation for the characters, it looks super nice!


The audio is fun, too. Almost all of the music is taken directly from the movies these two have starred in, with a couple original tracks mixed in, and although a couple of the tracks can be a bit annoying (looking at you, Whistle & Bells) they're mostly really good music!
The sound design itself is solid also. There's plenty of decent ambience audio for each environment, and the sound effects for combat are punchy and cartoony which fits the sense of humor of the game.


Really, I think the main problem here is, uh. The gameplay is a bit all over the place?
Like don't get me wrong, the game isn't buggy, it works fine, it functions, but it's... odd.
Everything feels like it plays at lightspeed, there's no real combos, the minigames kinda come out of nowhere and a lot of the time don't explain themselves very well, and-- actually that's a good way of putting it, a lot of things in this game don't really explain themselves very well.

So lemme sum up this gameplay real quick.
You have a light attack button (which doesn't combo, it just does a random regular punch out of your character's arsenal which knocks the enemy back a little bit, and if you wanna keep hitting them you have to walk up to them inbetween hits), then a strong attack button which does one special move depending on your character and consumes your recharging special meter. Bud has an overhead big punch, and Terrence has a multihit turboslap that you have to mash for (this isn't explained by the way).
Then you have a sprint which is done by double tapping or... clicking in the stick as you move? But also you can just use R2 which is much more comfortable but, again, not explained. Anyway you have a sprint attack that's very good for hitting crowds but also consumes meter.

You also have a block button which is... weird? With Bud, you can tap for a sort of deflection that lasts for like a fraction of a second and lets you counter attacks, or hold to keep blocking. But also depending on how many enemies are around you you can grab and knock two enemies into each other, or do a mashing thingy where you get 4+ enemies off of you all at once. Terrence, on the other hand, just uses that as a dodge button, letting him do a "dodge dash" of sorts if you hold a direction while you tap the button. Again, NONE OF IT IS EXPLAINED!

You can also grab weapons off the ground with a dedicated button, or if you're Bud also grab downed enemies to use as weapons. But all it really does is boost the damage of your normal punches, as the animation while holding the weapon is the same and it doesn't really seem to affect your range much at all. Again, kind of weird and scatterbrained.
Also grabbing downed enemies seems to deal little to no damage, so you can't defeat them that way, you just gotta let them get up on their own and attack them normally.

There's a couple more contextual things you can do but it depends on the stage and where they want you doing them. There's some breakable props that can drop items sometimes, and Terrence can climb on things and occasionally swing on scripted ceiling poles to hit enemies. Also not explained.

That's it. That's your entire repertoire.
It like, functions? But there's no real comboing, no real complex mechanics or anything. Not that a game like this really needed to be deep, but again, it feels kind of scatterbrained overall.

There's minigames that show up every once in a while, also barely explained or not explained at all. Like the western shootouts where you have limited shots to hit every enemy on a randomly moving cursor you don't control, or the driving sections where all you're told is how to accelerate and nothing else, or that fun but kinda weird "sausage and beer" game. Which I imagine is probably a reference to one of the movies me and my friend haven't watched yet.


Oh, one more thing. The writing.
It's fine! The story is basically like a comedic plot these two very much would've found themselves in, and the humor is alright. Not every joke lands, but there's a good few of them along with physical comedy befitting of the duo.
But also the translations seem, uh. Not very good?
I'm not sure where the team is from. Italy, I take it. But I played both in spanish and in english, and both of those had a lot of very AWKWARDLY-written lines and deliveries. It's weird, it feels like either the team didn't fully know these languages 100% or they just didn't give the translation teams a second writing pass at all. Not sure what happened there, spanish even straight up had a missing string of text in the airport stage.



I will say, the game IS fun overall! The visuals are super pretty, the music is fun, and the writing (even if poorly translated) is funny occasionally.
That said, I'd imagine this whole package is probably best suited for people who are already fans of the duo, especially for $15 a pop. Kind of expensive for a game you can beat in 2-3 hours with little issues.

I do still recommend it! Just, proabably on sale, and probably if you already know and like the Spencer/Hill duo. If you don't, you should go watch They Call Me Trinity and then get back on if you'd be interested or not.

Okay so, I thiiiink this game used to be paid at some point? And then was given away. I can't remember, it's been years. In any case I know I got the game for free when it likely wasn't meant to be (it has since become permanently free), and kept it in my library since, having only given it like one hour of gameplay before dropping it.

In any case, I recently remembered the game while looking through my (absolutely humongous) backlog and felt like giving it another shot.
...And ended up 100%ing it with all achievements done.
It's fun!


Okay, I'm gonna sum up the gameplay first. The main draw of a videogame that you're meant to be playing.
It's EXTREMELY simple. It can be played completely one-handed (shut up).
You play with the arrow keys and... nothing else, necessarily. You ride your horse on a 2D plane, as a randomized king/queen (it changes every run), left to right, on a big but finite map that you start close to the center of. You grab coins as your main and only resource, and you use those to interact with EVERYTHING in the world.

You tap the down arrow key to drop a coin where you stand, and you use that to recruit vagrants into your kingdom (they magically become well-dressed as soon as they grab a coin). You use them to buy and upgrade buildings (by holding instead of tapping to place them into them gradually). You use them to buy tools to equip your new citizens with.

You can double tap left or right (or hold shift but that ain't one-handed anymore) to sprint/gallop, but you have a limited stamina pool to work with. Or rather your horse does. But since the UI in this game is extremely minimal and organic, you just know you're running out when your horse starts panting visibly.

You can't really ORDER your units around. They just behave on their own.
You can recruit three types of units by buying tools for your unemployed citizens after recruiting them: Archers, builders and farmers.
Archers, on their own, roam around and hunt wild animals during the day (to generate a few coins), builders hand around the center of town and run all the way over to any trees you mark for cutting down, or (pre-placed) building spots you mark for construction/upgrades. They can also man catapults if you buy those, which automatically get wheeled over to the edges of your town, the furthest wall you've expanded to. Archers also split equally on both sides to your walls when night falls, to defend.

And defend you'll need to, because every night (with few exceptions) monsters attack. These little goblin guys called the Greed, that try to tear down your walls and destroy your recruited citizens to get at you and your coins (and most importantly your crown, which you'll drop if you get attacked without any coins and having it stolen by them is an instant game over). The only real way to defend against them is to already have archers and/or catapults in place and defended behind walls so they don't get overwhelmed.

The third type of recruit, farmers, are completely defenseless against everything. They'll automatically move towards any farms you've built and work on them during the day, producing a stupid amount of coins, and bunker up during the night (where they'll get obliterated if you don't have walls ahead of the farm to protect them).

Gameplay this simple and with so little in-the-moment control of your units might not be for everyone, but personally I really like how it all comes together. Especially combined with the art and music, it makes for a weirdly chill experience. Although it can get a bit frustrating at points until you get used to it, what with how slow units can be, how little control you have over them, and the fact you can kinda screw yourself if you destroy vagrant camps by expanding too much, since you get less places to recruit people from. It's simple to learn those details for though.


Now. The visuals. It's pixel art. So, it's relatively simple visuals.
And don't get me wrong, the environments are GORGEOUSLY drawn, with like a billion layers of parallaxing both in front and behind you, plenty of texture on everything, and really nice shading to go along with all of it.
The actual characters, humans and monsters and the like, are really simplistic though. I don't like calling simple western pixel art humans "McPixel-core" but, uh... That's kind of how the people here feel to me. Square heads with basically no face, extremely low-fidelity look, and not that much animation. Your own horse is RIDICULOUSLY smoothly animated but, everything else, not so much.
I do think it works fine, but once the wow factor of the environments wears off, the units you're gonna spend most of your gametime looking at are pretty unimpressive.


One thing I do wanna praise wholeheartedly though is the sound design.
Good LORD the soundscape here is way better than it has any right to be. Playing this with headphones is one hell of an experience.
The soundtrack is very ambient and moody, almost Minecraft-y in some ways if you want a more known point of comparison, and it works extremely well in elevating the game way beyond what it would've been otherwise. And combined with the ambience and general sounds it all melds into a perfect blend of audio, it's really really good.
The tracks, I think, are randomized? I didn't spot any specific pattern to what makes specific songs play, but I remember the blood moon (big horde night) songs surprising me with how good of a job they do of creating an ominous mood, and several of the day tracks are PERFECTLY synchronized to have their intro section end right as the nameplate for the day shows up onscreen, which really wowed me when I noticed it-

If you're gonna play this game, the soundtrack is definitely a more than valid reason to do it.


Anyway!
The game's free forever now, the soundtrack and audioscape are both incredible, the pixel art on the environments is pretty, and the gameplay is a bit "rustic"/simplistic but fun enough once you get the hang of it.
I'd recommend it! No real reason not to at least give it a shot for the low, low price of $0.

Okay so, Double Dragon. That's one hell of a storied franchise, given the rough history it had since its beginning, and its refusal to innovate combined with just handing out the IP to literally anyone who paid the license making it an absolute mess to look back on now with no proper continuity.
Then Technos died a horrible death and had its IPs bought up by ArcSys who now hogs the rights to it alongside River City/Kunio-Kun.

Not long BEFORE that buyout though, there was this attempt to revive the franchise in 2012. Handed out to WayForward (banger studio by the way, they have a super consistent track record for stuff like this), and given what seems to be a budget of three venezuelan bolivars and half a box of gummy worms.


...Yeah okay I'm gonna address the ugly 3D elephant in the room before anything else. This game is very CHEAP-feeling. You can just look at it and it almost looks like one of those weird Simple Series games from back on PS2. The 2D drawn backgrounds are relatively decent-looking, but then all the characters are these weird 3D models overlaid on top with kinda-janky animation. It doesn't look very pretty, you can tell they didn't have much budget to work with.

Don't let that deter you though, the graphics might be not great but EVERYTHING ELSE is great.


The gameplay is (surprisingly) a pretty solid evolution on the base formula! I'll sum it up real quick so you get a general idea.
So you have the standard beat-em-up bases. You have a sort-of-3D play area where you can move horizontally and vertically, then you can attack and jump.

You have two types of attacks: Punches (which just keep going infinitely like in the oldest beat-em-up franchises like Golden Axe) and kicks (which are an actual regular 3-hit combo that ends in a spinkick with very useful i-frames).
Hitting enemies enough (depends on the type of enemy) or with specific types of attacks (the spinkick is great for this) will stun enemies with a very visible freeze effect and audio cue to let you know.
And once an enemy is stunned, you can either punch them, which will turn into an uppercut launcher that lets you juggle them, or grab them (you can only grab stunned enemies and certain small flying enemies) to fling them behind you, hitting every other enemy that's in the way.

There's a sprint button, which has a small animation startup, but makes you move a LOT faster horizontally (and also has two attacks you can do out of it, a slide kick and a shoulder tackle which is good for staggering and stunning).

You also have a "crouch" button that essentially acts as your dodge/parry. You're invincible for a brief moment when you crouch, and you can chain that into one of two attacks (a sweep kick or a rising knee launcher), or you can roll out of it. Timing a crouch/dodge right as an attack is about to hit you gives you "gleam", which is a temporary buff that doubles your attack for a short duration. So you're REALLY encouraged to learn enemy attacks and engage with them by way of dodging so you can destroy them even harder when it's your turn to combo them.

All of this combines REALLY well, especially since once you've launched an enemy you can keep hitting them in the air, juggle them, and even wall-bounce them if the screen is locked to a specific arena to keep your combo going.
For instance, you could dodge an enemy's attack, roll behind them, now buffed with gleam, then do a couple punches from the back and chain that into a spinkick (you can combine punches and kicks) that stuns the enemy, then launch them with an uppercut, cancel that into a crouch, launch them again in the air with your rising knee, bounce them against the wall, then do a full kick combo on them as they fall back towards you.


Add on top of all of this the mixtape system.
Being the 80s love letter that it is, the main characters basically power themselves up by equipping and listening to mixtapes.
There's two types: Passive mixtapes and "Sosetsitsu" (special attack) mixtapes, and there's ten of each type. The passive ones affect your stats, and depending on which one you equip can have additional effects (like extending your gleam buffs or having health steal on your attacks).
The Sosetsitsu tapes let you use the special button (yeah, another mechanic) to burn up some of your recharging energy meter and use whatever move you've equipped. They range from projectiles, to risky-but-strong melee attacks, to invincible "get off me"-type moves, to healing utility for co-op. There's a lot of options!

That said, you do have to level up mixtapes by grabbing duplicates dropped by defeated enemies, or buying those duplicates from the in-game shops with the money you collect. There's also a tapesmith that uses a second currency dropped by bosses to raise the max level of whatever tapes you pick, you can level them up even more. It's a bit of a weird system and you'll probably need to level those things for replays on higher difficulties, but if you don't mind a tiny little bit of grinding (or only plan on playing normal mode) it's fine. It adds a neat layer of customization to the already pretty good gameplay, and many of the Sosetsitsu moves are pretty good for comboing on top of the rest of your arsenal.


Also one thing I CAN't not mention. The music.
It's INSANELY good dude, I really can't put into words how good this game's music is. The whole thing's composed by WayForward audio god Jake Kaufman, following a bunch of 80s styles, and pretty much all of it is super catchy. Both the vocal and non-vocal tracks (cause yes, there's vocals). The second stage's pop track and the final stage's kung-fu-movie-ass brassy tune are probably my favorites in the whole game. ALL OF IT is worth a listen though.


And the other thing I should mention. The game's humor/writing/tone.
So, I've mentioned a couple times that the game's one gigantic 80s homage. Down to its Neon title.
And the, uh, questionably ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥-y trailer you probably already saw in this same store page.

It's dumb, stupid, cheesy, and voice acted awkwardly in the BEST possible way. The whole thing is written like some 80s cartoon and is full of insane and stupid setpieces like the two dumbass protagonists just "holding their breath" during the space level and being fine that way, the bad guys flying a helicopter upside down to hit you with the blades, the girlfriend you rescue sending you after the bad guy with literally the power of love, or THE ENTIRE ENDING SEQUENCE BEING THIS REALLY STUPID BUT REALLY CATCHY MUSICAL WHERE THE BAD GUY GIVES YOU THE BEAT-THE-GAME ACHIEVEMENT AND SINGS ABOUT IT WITH PERFECT TIMING AS HE'S EXPLODING, ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥.

It's humorous, but not in, like, a Marvel/millenial/self-deprecating unbearable modern style if you're worried about that. It's just wholeheartedly, unabashedly, earnestly stupid the whole way through. And I loved every second of it, almost my entire time with this game I spent rocking the stupidest grin on my face. Your mileage may vary if you wanted something more serious, though.


In summary? I ADORE this game. It's absolutely worth a shot, especially if you do it co-op which makes it even more fun (and changes some of the dialogue to match the two characters in fun ways).
It's dirt-cheap (matching its low budget) and it's super duper fun, with surprisingly deep and solid gameplay and EXTREMELY good music. Hell, I'd say it's worth a shot even just for the music alone, but the game itself is a really fun time too.