Avengers (Arcade)
As strange as it might seem now, the name Avengers didn’t always conjure images of Marvel’s enormously popular superhero team. Prior to the Marvel Cinematic Universe taking off, it was fairly likely someone without comic knowledge might think of the 60s British spy show The Avengers instead. However, even before Marvel’s heroes became the big cultural touchstone they are today, you’d still very rarely find anyone who thought of the 1987 arcade brawler Avengers first.
In this top down brawler that is sometimes known as just Avenger, one or two players set out to expel Geshita and his goons from Paradise City after they kidnap a group of six girls. Each level you head to involves the interchangeable heroes Ryu and Ko freeing one of the girls the gang captured, the first three levels showing off Paradise City’s varied layout as the first level takes you through modern streets, the second seems to take place in a historic Japanese district, and the final part of the city you explore seems ripped from the American Old West. Soon after you’ve saved the third girl you head out to face Geshita on his home turf, traveling through a mountain pass and jungle until you reach the Palace of the Gashita, a name whose different spelling and sudden shift from referring to the main villain with the name raises some questions about just who you are fighting. Based on the little amount of in-game text and the arcade flyer constantly referring to the villain as “Geshita” in quotes it could be a title given to him, but my efforts to understand its meaning have lead to me learning that the term likely came from a Japanese term that means “I understand” or possibly “I did”, so the poor translation of the time period means the mystery of this naming choice remains unsolved.
When it comes to fighting the man who might be called Geshita and his gang, Ryu and Ko have a very limited range of attacks. The two buttons on the cabinet are assigned to punch and kick, and while it might want you to believe there are specific use cases for both attack options, you’ll quickly find the punch is practically useless compared to the almighty kick. In this top down brawler reach is king, even the most basic enemies able to snag onto your hero and start headbutting you for massive damage if you don’t repel them quickly enough. If you are grabbed you can wildly shake your joystick to break free, but it’s best to just not get grabbed and risk that huge drop in health, especially since your low health is going to lead to plenty of trouble with bosses and enemies who hurl things at you anyway. Your punch’s range is so short that it doesn’t matter that it’s supposedly stronger than your kick since if they’re close enough to be punched they’re probably already hitting you with something stronger. You can get a power-up to make the punching even stronger, but it fades in time and you still don’t really want to put yourself in grabbing range.
The kick is therefore your bread and butter, especially since you can move and kick at the same time so you can practically run around jabbing your leg out with little consequence if it’s mistimed. Holding an enemy back with your foot is usually enough to let you kick them again if they didn’t go down to that first blow, so with the punch obsolete by comparison, a lot of Avengers is going to be running around kicking as enemies scramble around the screen trying to grab you or chuck things like bombs and scythes your way. There is at least one more part of your basic move set to draw on that isn’t entirely pointless, the player able to hit both punch and kick at once to do a full 360 degree kick. Almost every level likes to cram in a bunch of baddies before the boss fight and there are other areas where the screen can be crowded with too many enemies to simply keep at bay with your regular kicking, so spinning in place can help thin the numbers before you get back to the boring but effective work of shoving your foot in the face of everything that comes your way.
There are rare pick-ups that give you a few new ways to hurt enemies though, Ryu and Ko able to get some projectile options like kunai and bombs. If you can manage to carry these to a boss fight they can be pretty helpful since most of them try to keep you from closing in with your deadly leg, but if you try to use them in regular battle you’ll likely hit the weak enemies by mistake rather than projectile throwers they’re body blocking. Finding these pick-ups isn’t very common and the ammunition provided for them is low as well so they’re likely to be quickly exhausted without too big of an impact, but the areas you find them are mildly interesting. Sometimes busting a door down or breaking open a suspicious wall will bring you to a bonus room where you can rough up some guys in a bar, fight snakes in a temple, or play whack-a-mole with some enemies to get special items. These are timed and not creative enough to be amusing, but they are at least a break away from a game where the best tactics are either to run at everything with your leg extended or to just run past them since only a few times will the screen lock in place and force you to fight what’s around.
The extremely repetitive and unexciting regular fighting caps off with a boss battle in each stage, and these show some of the potential Avengers had but often failed to reach. These boss battles often have some gimmick that means you can’t just charge in, but whether or not this is an interesting complication or something incredibly annoying varies. A good example of a promising boss is the one you fight on a bridge, the player unable to hurt him if they just run forward and strike since he’ll block it all. However, if you bait him into striking you can then move in and land some hits before he returns to his defensive tactics. On the other hand though we have the jungle’s boss, a guy who will dive into the water if you get too close when he’s not doing his incredibly quick snake rope attack. Trying to find the right time window is aggravating before you even consider how much time this boss’s retreating wastes, and since there are timers for each level that kill you if you can’t finish them in time, you are likely to run out of time fighting him if you can’t figure out the way to exploit his movement pattern.
The final boss hits on a problem a few of the bosses have where attacks might not even register on larger foes. The first boss you might kick a little too far to the left or right and not deal damage, but since his only attack is swinging a ball and chain it’s not too bad. The final confrontation with Geshita though requires you to hit him in an arbitrary spot on his body, he moves around a lot unless you corner him and exploit his AI, and his own attacks can deal heavy damage if you don’t do frequent retreats. Funnily enough, the aggravatingly slow snake boss has detection issues that can work in your favor, like attacking the water where he dove in or kicking diagonally to deal damage even though your kick seemed to hit above his sprite. The issues with registering hits that aren’t blocked combined with how much damage you can take if you aren’t perfectly backing off at the right times make many of these battles worse than their design concepts might have been otherwise, and while Avengers is nice enough not to set you back too far when you’re out of lives and need to pop in that next credit, the fighting rarely hits a point where it feels like you’re meant to be clever in how you approach a foe.
THE VERDICT: Avengers sets itself apart from most beat ’em ups with its top-down perspective on the action, but the way the fighting is designed certainly won’t help us find out if the different viewpoint has potential. Your awful and risky punch means you’re really only going to rely on leg thrusts and spinning kicks almost exclusively and regular enemies don’t challenge that approach well enough. On the other hand, bosses often have tricks that make them annoying to approach and feature issues with communicating how you’re meant to fight them, although exploiting bad AI or hit detection is often the answer. Once you learn your kick is the only way to go to avoid being destroyed by the enemy opposition, Avengers will only provide battles that are so easy they’re boring or fights that are aggravating with how they’re structured.
And so, I give Avengers for arcade machines…
A TERRIBLE rating. Many brawlers already struggle with the issue of being repetitive, but you can at least expect some flashy moves or enemy variety to make up for the fact you don’t need to vary your attack approach too much to win. However, Avengers really does just boil down to kicking your way through almost every encounter, even boss fights being about kicking right despite finding that kick opening sometimes being a bit obtuse and frustratingly unclear. Health ends up a fairly big commodity due to how many things can quickly rob you of it so you aren’t even incentivized to fight very often, although that at least means you can run past many of the bland encounters with basic goons. Projectile throwers can be a bit more difficult to handle, but running past them can sometimes be safer than confronting them too, and it’s not really an informed strategy so much as one you’ll rely on after losing your lives in the less than stellar boss encounters. The bridge battle does show there is room for this battle style to be a bit more interesting though. Fights where the rules are clear after a short period of learning, where foes have an advantage you need to overcome, and ones where you won’t be discouraged by incorrect collision detection or annoying enemy movement could have made these big fights a better way to wrap up each of the six stages. Unfortunately, unless the regular fights could also make you engage with them beyond mashing a single attack, Avengers would still be generally unpleasant and bland.
It’s hard to really identify what the draw of Avengers is meant to be. Beat ’em ups weren’t such a big genre yet that its top down perspective would seem novel, and the incredible simplicity of the action coupled with difficulty spikes meant that even mindless action would seem unappealing or constantly rub up against boss design issues. This might have just been an experimental step for the young Capcom, but unfortunately that step was into a quagmire of ill-conceived combat decisions, and unlike their first game Vulgus it doesn’t seem to contain any historical curiosities. Besides a humorous misdirect where you tell people you’re going to play Avengers and end up playing this instead of one of the games based on Marvel’s superheroes, it’s really hard to find a reason to dig up this forgotten brawler that coincidentally shares a name with one of the biggest media franchises of our time.