River City Girls 2 Review: Older, Wiser, Stronger

I think anyone born in or around a certain era of gaming has kind of an intrinsic fondness for sidescrolling beat ’em ups. I certainly have my fair share of childhood memories with games like X-Men, The Simpsons, and Sunset Riders. That’s part of what makes the resurgence of the genre in recent years so cool. The other part is the extent to which developers have gone to evolve the genre further, leading to action-packed gems like River City Girls 2.

Review Takeaways

• Same great action, tweaked to be better
• Improved quality of life features
• Gigantic World Map
• Six playable characters
• Fun solo, better with friends
• Final Score: 9 out of 10

School’s Out Forever

River City Girls 2 picks up more or less right after the first game. Misako and Kyoko found Kunio and Rikki and walk off happily into the sunset, conspicuously forgetting that they had just run afoul of a gigantic yakuza organization. Upon hearing the news of Sabuko’s defeat, her father, the organization’s head, breaks out of prison and uses his resources to conquer River City from the shadows, having Misako and Kyoko expelled from their school in the process. They don’t care much at first, but after it suddenly becomes a lot harder to buy video games, they resolve to oust the yakuza from the city, one punched face at a time.

The first River City Girls was a somewhat open-ended game with linear objectives, but an open world you could run around to level up. This game, however, goes whole hog with it. The world map, encompassing River City’s various districts, is absolutely gigantic, multiple times the size of the old one. At any given time, you’ll get text messages cluing you into both mainline quests and sidequests all over the place, and the order in which you tackle them is entirely up to you. Some areas of the map are locked at first, but the world starts opening up pretty quickly, offering lots of places to explore and bust heads.

Knuckle Sandwiches, Now with New and Improved Flavor!

The general combat experience, the meat and potatoes of the core gameplay loop, is more or less the same as the original game. The map is divvied up into individual scenes, and if you’re in a new or plot-relevant area, you’ll get screen-locked into a battle with a gang of thugs. Your characters start with only a couple of moves, but as you level up, earn cash, and eat everything on offer in River City’s various shops (including books and video games, somehow), you become stronger and learn new moves. Fans of fighting games and players of the first game will immediately feel some of the subtle improvements to the combat, making it quicker and more responsive, not to mention more amenable to good ol’ fashioned air juggling.

Even if you don’t have a head for fighting games, you’ll likely notice the game’s myriad of quality-of-life improvements. Healing items purchased from shops can be quickly used with a flick of the right stick instead of needing to open the menu, and enemies also drop instant heals more readily. You can uncover multiple hideouts around the city where you can restore your health for free and swap out characters, and recruited enemies now have health bars instead of limited uses, letting you use them more liberally. Those are just a few examples, and they all come together to make an experience that feels more pleasantly challenging and less frustratingly punishing, at least on the normal difficulty setting.

Related: How to Increase Stats in River City Girls 2

If you get tired of normal brawls, the game also features minigames in both its mainline and sidequests. At one point, local dodgeball player Yoko asked me to train her team for an upcoming game, and I got to play an actual game of dodgeball, almost like a lite version of the old River City Super Dodgeball game from the 90s. Sometimes, fights will have special conditions, like needing to prevent thugs from bringing money into a bank vault or repairing generators to break a screen lock.

I played through the game by myself, but as any River City game should, it features full co-op. You can play two-player co-op with a friend online, or up to four players locally. You get Misako, Kyoko, Kunio, and Rikki to start, but there are a couple more characters you unlock later down the line, including the breakdancing deliverer of street justice Provie and damsel-in-distress-turned Amazonian ab-master Marian. Levels and stats are still tied to individual characters, so, unfortunately, you can’t just swap to someone else when your mood dictates, though all characters do get experience and money when you beat a boss or clear a sidequest, so that’s nice at least.

Gorgeous Graphics, Toe-Tappin’ Tunes

Of course, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the metric whoa-ton of polish that’s gone into this game’s presentation. All of the first game’s voice cast has returned to reprise their previous roles, along with a variety of talented newcomers voicing newer and weirder characters. All of this is accompanied by both gorgeously flowing sprite art and new character CGs for dialogue windows.

River City Girls 2 also has a killer soundtrack, full of hard rock licks, moody pop tunes, and kickin’ hip-hop beats. You can even unlock the songs and have them play in your hideouts if you just wanna sit and vibe to them for a while, which you totally do.

Related: How to Unlock and Swap Recruits in River City Girls 2

Any complaints I could make about this game would be nitpicking; they took an already-excellent framework with the first River City Girls and fixed just about everything I had hangups on. It feels like this game was carefully crafted by a group of people who made something cool and fun, and wanted to make something cooler and more fun. Guess what? They succeeded.

“River City: It’s a Nice Place! We Swear!”

Whether you’re an old-school fan of sidescrolling beat ’em ups, an aficionado of fighting games, or just a casual enjoyer of lovingly-crafted video games, there’s tons of fun to be had with River City Girls 2. Like I said, it’s a grand old time by yourself, but it is more fun with friends. Luckily, the game does support Steam remote play together, so even if your friends don’t have it, you can get together for an afternoon of brawling.

The only other thing I could possibly hope for is a sequel to Double Dragon Neon with this same team and framework. Tell me that wouldn’t be incredible, I dare you.

River City Girls 2 is available on PC via Steam, Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S.