Tokyo Beat Down (DS)

There was a certain delightful cheesiness to the cop shows and movies of the 1970s and 80s where cops were so devoted to the concept of justice they would paradoxically break whatever laws necessary to apprehend any criminal unfortunate enough to catch their attention. While more realistic depictions of police work are excellent for serious drama, the old school police officers on T.V. certainly had their charm, and Tokyo Beat Down lovingly reproduces it in a way that both lampoons the ridiculousness of it but happily engages in the same kinds of stories one might find in those old stories of loose cannon cops and conniving criminals.

 

Taking place in Tokyo as one might expect, the story of Tokyo Beat Down follows a specific precinct of cops who have become well known for their violent devotion to making sure that criminals, no matter how small, are brought to justice. Nicknamed “The Beast Cops”, the ethos of these officers is best exemplified by the game’s main character, Lewis Cannon, the only character in the game with a non-Japanese name solely for the sake of the pun. Lewis Cannon is a concentrated form of the kind of fictional cop so devoted to justice he can barely think of anything else. Lewis is content to beat up people suspected of even the smallest crimes and quick to taunt enemies with a situation-appropriate twist on how he’ll arrest them and bring them to justice, spouting such lines as “Third floor: Clearance sale on lingerie… and justice!” while fighting through a shopping center. He’s also incredibly dull, the game managing to spin a lot of humor out of his attempts at trying to turn every moment into a righteous crusade for the greater good or him just failing to understand anything outside of his narrow view of what police work requires. Early on, the officers receive an anonymous call from a guy saying he wants to see “fireworks”, and Lewis seems to think it was a wrong number since the police don’t sell fireworks. When he’s finished beating up a group of guys, only then does he think to ask a fellow officer what their crime was, only to learn it was a dine and dash… which he surprisingly considers the worst kind of crime, although it wouldn’t be hard to believe he considers every crime somehow equal in awfulness.

Lewis’s exaggerated personality and warped sense of the world are absolutely the most interesting part of Tokyo Beat Down, but he’s not the only member of the Beast Cops. Most of them will serve as conversational partners for Lewis, characters like Hiro Suzuki serving as the straight man to his silliness at times and Shin Koga being a rookie who tries to do things by the book much to the astonishment and derision of the other Beast Cops, but the two other playable cops besides Lewis have their silly moments as well. Takeshi Bando is the captain of the team, but while he’s somewhat serious during cutscenes, he’ll happily piledrive enemies and sumo stomp them away during play. Rika Hyodo is the forces only female member, and her exasperation with Lewis’s approach tends to fuel some of the funnier moments including the dine and dash joke mentioned earlier. While the plot will try to have its dramatic moments as well as you get deeper into it, the more you unravel about the strange terrorist attacks striking Tokyo, the more unusual its new criminals and their joint plot is revealed to be, even when everyone is now treating it as a serious threat.

 

Sadly, most of the game will be spent with the beat ’em up gameplay that was not given the same level of love or attention as the unfortunately infrequent yet hilarious cutscenes. Most of the fighting will rely on your punch and kick buttons, the way you chain them together determining which combo you pull off. No matter which character you are this will be the same even though the combos will look different, but these combos aren’t very rewarding for one huge reason: knockdowns. Knockdowns in this game bring any combat to a crawl, because if a character has been knocked to the ground, whether they be the player’s cop or an enemy criminal, they are invulnerable until they are fully back on their feet. Getting up takes a bit, and since both hero and villain will take plenty of hits before they are defeated, combat tends to have annoying waiting periods where you can’t really do anything since someone is slowly recovering from the previous blow. It actually ends up wiser not to complete combos, going instead for incomplete chains of punches or kicks to rack up damage on an enemy without hitting them to the ground, and that ends up making your attacks feel puny and the battles become boring. However, the criminals you face will come in numbers, so knockdowns can find a use in briefly incapacitating a few foes so you can do your incomplete chains on whoever is left standing, few foes really having a good way of handling that approach unless they’ve got backup to distract you from completing the slow wear down of their health.

The criminals do quickly start coming in different varieties though, and while some like the big guys are mostly just the same with larger health bars, when weapons get involved things can get a bit more interesting. Enemies with guns will hang back and knock you down with powerful gunfire, the player needing to prioritize keeping them incapacitated in a fight to avoid constant harassment from afar. You’re packing heat as well though, and while you can combo into a pistol shot for free, your other weapon options require ammo, something the game is pretty willing to provide regularly save for special weapons like the rocket launcher. Your usual weapon options will be things like handguns, machine guns, and shotguns that are uncovered in the streets and buildings you fight in, and while these are pretty damaging, all of them knock down an opponent when the shot lands. This can be good for blasting back a crowd or handling bosses that are resistant to the knock down effects, but unless you want a lot of down time, its more a back up option for tougher enemy teams. Special moves serve similar purposes, each of the three characters having a strong move to knock away enemies but the attacks cost health to execute. A throw option also exists that will again lead to that lull in combat as you wait for them to recover. Knock down is an unfortunate reality as you have no doubt become aware, especially considering the way the game spaces out health recovery so that trying to take the less slow approach to combat can be punished with heavy damage from backup enemies.

 

The brawler battles at least are active gameplay though. There are portions of the game where you are just meant to wander around an area to talk to every civilian as part of an “investigation” that only really wraps up once you’ve heard they pretty much know nothing about what happened.  The citizens are at least given ridiculous names to make it more interesting, such as FRIGHTENINGLY Calm Female, Girl who Values Her Life, and Boy who Can’t Plan Well. Some citizens can lead to diversions to get bulletproof vests for more health and skill scrolls to learn more moves despite not really needing these boosts to be able to beat the game, so this segment of gameplay, especially when required, can drag things down to an even slower crawl. Thankfully, the bosses at least change up play with somewhat better battles. Some can be handled the same as regular enemies and others with just liberal use of guns, but fighting guys in forklifts and tanks or characters using varied martial arts do serve as proper challenges of the fighting and weapon mechanics. The battles don’t really push things so far they overcome their inherent flaws though, but the break from fighting waves of baddies and having to plan your approach a bit more is appreciated nonetheless.

THE VERDICT: This delightful love letter to cheesy cop shows is definitely a game best played for the humorous cliches and cartoonish caricatures of cops who will do whatever it takes to enforce justice, but it doesn’t quite justify pushing through the bulk of Tokyo Beat Down’s contents, that being the weak and often slow brawler portions. Using interesting attacks is often punished with brief periods of down time while you wait for the enemy to get back up, and the seconds wasted on waiting for knocked down characters add up to make the fighting slow paced. Certain approaches to combat can nearly make it palatable, but then even slower investigation portions lead to most of your experience being slow or dull, interesting boss battles and hilarious jokes just not common enough to warrant the time spent getting to them.

 

And so, I give Tokyo Beat Down for Nintendo DS…

A BAD rating. Most of what buoys the experience is the loving parody of 1970s and 80s police shows and films, and the way it goes about it is even worthy of actually laughing at, but while these moments are the main draw, the effort of getting to them for a few laughs really doesn’t justify the rest of the experience. The brawling portions could be easily remedied, with either the characters being quicker to recover from knock downs or the player packing moves to hit them while their down to continue the flow of the action, but unfortunately it’s hard to find an enjoyable rhythm in battles that will either feature plenty of starts and stops or will rely on incomplete attack chains so your simple but effective attacks clean things up more quickly. The situations where you’re pressured from all sides or have to handle a boss that requires a different approach do show the potential for a good beat ’em up at the heart of Tokyo Beat Down, but one small design decision ended up spoiling the whole of the experience.

 

Despite featuring over-the-top cops, Tokyo Beat Down unfortunately didn’t quite reproduce the energy of classic cop T.V. with its all too slow combat. The cutscenes have absurd moments like car chases and jumping out of helicopters and through mall skylights to join the fight, but the battles, besides some of the special moves, are too often basic or downright dull. The silliness that might draw you in to play ends up harder to appreciate after you’ve been worn down by the stale battle system that is the most common part of this otherwise wonderfully ridiculous game.