Breakneck City (Nintendo Switch)

There have been tonnes of new, retro inspired beat em ups in recent years, Scott Pilgrim, River City Girls and of course the masterpiece Streets of Rage 4, but they all seem to take the same 2D sprite based influence. Breakneck City throws back to slight more modern, early 3D polygon aesthetic, reminiscent of games like Diehard Arcade on the Sega Saturn.

It’s an interesting choice as I think most people agree that 2D sprite art has aged much better than the early 3D look, but as I mentioned, there are so many new pixel art brawlers, the over saturated, low poly look of Breakneck City was actually quite refreshing to me.

You can choose between the two playable characters, Sidney and Justine who play the same as far as I can tell, and hit the streets to rid the city of corporate corruption. It’s not an Oscar worth narrative, but I don’t think it needs to be for this genre of game.

Breakneck City plays like your standard side scrolling beat em up, and when I say standard, I mean as bare bones as you can get, unfortunately. There are jump, punch and kick buttons, all with very limited applications. You can perform a 3 hit combo with the punch and arial attacks with the jump, and a solo kick, but that really is it. There is no complex combo system, no grapples, throws or specials. This makes the combat start to feel stale pretty quickly.

The one unique mechanic of the game is the slide. You can use the right thumb stick to endlessly (and somewhat inexplicably) glide around the play area at hyper speed. Despite the odd looking animation, this is super useful to get out of corners filled with enemies, but I feel it could have been expanded upon. You can however use it to interact with some of the scenery for attacks like spinning around a lamp post. You can also use some of elements of the environment to despatch of enemies although lining this up can be frustrating if you’re trying to do it intentionally.

There are a nice selection of weapons you can pick up along the way such as pipes, bats, knives, swords and even guns, but I could never reliably fire the guns!? Pressing the punch attack simply pointed the gun for a brief moment. After some experimentation with the controls I managed to fire them by pressing punch and kick together, but this didn’t seem to work every time, even when I had ammo. I’m not sure if this is a bug or if I am missing something but there is no on screen prompt or any documentation to explain the controls better.

This pretty much summed up my experience with Breakneck City to be honestly. Everything about the game felt very bear bones and unpolished. It feels like a cool game that just needed some extra time to be full fleshed out. A bit more polish to the UI, a deeper combo system, fixing some of the very glitchy AI and overall performance of the game.

Breakneck City isn’t terrible. Thats sounds like an insult but I really don’t mean it as one. There is a lot I like about the game, but everything I thought was cool or interesting had a caveat of just feeling generally unfinished. If this was an early access game, I’d be really excited to see how the finished version turns out, but at the moment with so many great alternatives in the same genre available, sadly it’s difficult to recommend Breakneck City as it is on version 1.0 at launch.