Review — The Asskickers (PC/Mac)

Over the past few months, I’ve been digging a little deeper into PC gaming. While I’ll probably never get away from console gaming, it’s easy for me to appreciate everything about the scene: games tend to be cheaper, look better than their console counterparts with even modest hardware, and, most interestingly, there’s an indie sector with wild, imaginative ideas that absolutely thrives where it would otherwise be buried on a service like Xbox Live Arcade.

As a longtime gamer, I’ve got a special place in my heart for side-scrolling beat ’em ups, and the genre simply didn’t take off on PCs the way it did in arcades or in living rooms with 16-bit consoles.  While I was playing Super Double Dragon and Streets of Rage, PC gamers were buried in Monkey Island — that’s just the way it is.

Aside from rereleases of games such as Streets of Rage and Final Fight on PlayStation Network and Xbox Live Arcade, and the oddball (but magnificent) release of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World: The Game, the brawler genre has been all but dead since its heyday almost 20 years ago. So when I saw that a small indie developer had released an HD, hand-drawn brawler for PC and Mac, titled The Asskickers, no less, I felt compelled to give it a try.

The Asskickers, unfortunately, does anything but.