‘Burning Fight ACA NEOGEO’ Review – You Should Probably Have That Looked At
One of the hardest things about being a new console maker is that you usually won't get much help from third parties until you're well-known. That means you have to power your system yourself and fill in any gaps as needed. Of course, the NEOGEO was not a typical platform. In fact, it's likely that SNK didn't care much about the home console version. But even in arcades, a platform was being sold. If SNK couldn't give players new games regularly in the genres they wanted, there would always be room for a game from another company. It's a big request, and it's not often that a company can handle it with grace.
I'll be honest and say that I think SNK had some luck on their side. At the time the NEOGEO came out, SNK was not known for making a wide range of high-quality games in different genres. It did make the occasional hit, and it had a few popular games under its belt. It wasn't quite Capcom, Konami, Namco, SEGA, or Nintendo. In many ways, putting out the NEOGEO was a very risky thing for the publisher to do. SNK tried to make games in all the popular arcade genres, but in the beginning, most of its successes and failures were very similar to its previous strengths and weaknesses. It did well in one major type of game that it hadn't done well in before: one-on-one fighting games. Luckily for SNK, that was soon the only type of game that most people who went to arcades cared about.
Burning Fight, which costs $3.99, is a good example of what could have happened to SNK. The company knew it needed a game to compete with games like Double Dragon and Final Fight, which had just come out from Capcom. It doesn't even try to hide how much it takes from other games, so it's hard not to think of it as a "dollar-store Final Fight" at first. The game got good reviews and did pretty well when it came out, but it seems to have become something of a punching bag among the rest of the NEOGEO games.
Let's go with the idea that not every game can be as good as the best in its genre, and that it's not really fair to expect it to. Without a doubt, Burning Fight is not as good as Final Fight. It's not as good as Streets of Rage or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, so you shouldn't talk about it with them. Most games in this genre aren't. But how is Burning Fight different from other side-scrolling beat-em-up games? How does it stack up against games like Ninja Gaiden by Tecmo or 64th Street by Jaleco? In that situation, it looks better.
It's a decent brawler that is neither great nor terrible. You have three different characters: the guy who is fast but weak, the guy who is strong but slow, and the guy who is just average. Guy and Cody can be seen in both Fast Guy and Average Guy. They walk through a made-up version of Osaka with a lot of cute details in the background. They fight against punks, pro wrestlers who look suspiciously like people they know, and even the occasional car. There are a lot of things that can be broken, and you can pick up and use a wide variety of weapons. In this game, weapons are thrown at you at a very fast rate. Some of the places where you fight have so many weapons that you can't help but pick them up when you just want to punch someone.
You can punch a guy, kick a guy, jump, and kick a guy while you're in the air. You can also throw someone, but it doesn't help as much as it does in most other brawlers. You can also use the normal super attack, which costs some of your life, by pressing the jump and punch buttons together. You don't have a very strong arsenal, and if you try to get fancy, your enemies will stop you pretty quickly. They, on the other hand, have many different ways to attack you. In general, you'll want to punch someone if you're close enough to do so. If they don't, try kicking them. If they're too far away, you'll have to move closer. In this game, jump-kicks are a bit hit-or-miss because enemies can gang up on you and stop your offense, but if you're feeling adventurous, go for it!
The hits have a strange feel to them, like a lot of SNK's beat-em-ups from the time. It feels less like you're hitting your enemies and more like you're attacking the air they're in and doing some kind of psychic damage to them. Still, it has a certain charm, and it's not something that only Burning Fight has to deal with. One of the tricks to making a great game in this genre is to make sure that the hits really hurt. I think Capcom and SEGA made that look easier than I think it was.
There are five stages to fight through, and they take you to a lot of different places. Each one ends with at least one boss fight, and some of them also have boss fights in the middle. In some parts, you can also find bonus areas. If you go to these places, you'll have to destroy some objects in a certain amount of time. If you do it right, you'll get more points and more lives. It gives the game a little something extra that you don't see in many other games of the time, and even though it's not much, I like it. As was already said, the game's background is a lot of fun. The main characters and most of the enemies don't have very interesting animations, but the game does have some fun parts, like when enemies come out of the background.
Burning Fight is almost certainly best played with a friend, just like most games of this type. Since this is the mobile ACA NEOGEO line, you'll need to connect two external controllers to your device in order to play a two-player game. When I see games like these, I really wish Hamster had some way to play online with other people, but what can you do? I will say that you can have fun here even if you only use the touch controls, because you don't have to be very accurate. You might find it easier to play with a controller, but you're not going to run out of coins or anything.
If you've played any of Hamster's recent ACA NEOGEO mobile games, the options and extras here will look very familiar. You get both the Japanese and international versions of the game, as well as a Score Attack mode and a Caravan mode with a time limit. There are online leaderboards to compete on, which helps keep the game interesting since there are a lot of different ways to score compared to other beat-em-ups. The game's difficulty, how it looks, how the controls can be set up, and other options are mostly the same as what we've seen in other games in this series, so it has just about everything you could want.
Burning Fight is a pretty bad beat-em-up for the time it was made. You can have fun with it, but once you're done, you probably won't remember much about it. It doesn't do anything to make it more than an uninspired copy of Final Fight, but there is a certain pleasure to be found in knocking heads together. The conversion was done well, as usual, by Hamster, and it's one of those arcade games that works well even with virtual buttons.
It's too bad there isn't an easier way to start a two-player game, because that would give a game that needs it a lot of spice. Without that, Burning Fight is still the same game it has always been: a completely forgettable scrolling beat-em-up that will help you kill an hour or so if you need it. It's not the kind of game people usually play on the NEOGEO, and SNK is very lucky that it never had to be. There's no way this should be on your phone or tablet before Streets of Rage 4, but there are worse ways to fight.
