Now, I understand that the Double Dragon games are some of the earliest example of the beat-em-up and that they haven’t dated all that well. But not putting any effort into boosting the graphics with SEGA’s 16 bit hardware and fobbing us off with a new attack system that boils down to using the A button for attacking left and the C button for attacking right is just plain moronic.

Double Dragon II’s presentation is abysmal at best. 16 bit games shouldn’t look like 8 bit games! We appreciate this game was released in an 8 bit era but the arcade original looks and sounds better than this. The music was ported over well but that’s all I can say positively on the matter of presentation.

Gameplay is so frustrating we want to punch something just to express our anger at how sloppy a job has been done on this port. Moving is fairly responsive but the idea of having a button to attack in each direction is confusing and pointless. Why not have an attack button for punching a separate button for kicks and then you can attack in the direction you’ve faced the character? This argument would be relevant if you could actually tell whether your attacks are connecting. The collision detection is horrible and the sound effect for a connecting punch or kick is so pathetic that half the time you might aswell just be mashing the controller and hoping for the best.

Then there’s the enemies. If your control system is already broken then why make the enemies AI so brilliant? You cannot escape the wrath of the game’s enemies. They’re always hot on your tail ready to make you their bitch and there’s almost nothing you can do about it. The most effective form of attack that you are given is using one of the many weapons they game drops in randomly but of course, the weapon actually has to be there for you to use it. If it isn’t, you’re a bit stuffed.

As I mentioned earlier, the music is actually the only redeeming quality this game has. Although it isn’t technically impressive, the arrangements are nice and fit the action well. Sound effects on the other hand are weak and grainy as most of them are sampled. I know the Mega Drive’s sound chip isn’t fantastic but there are so many games that pull off better sampled effects than this.

If you purchase this game after reading this then only God can help you. Once you witness the horror that is Double Dragon II you’ll soon have your face in your palms. The whole feel of this game is like it’s been pirated onto the Mega Drive, not ported.

So how do I score something this bad? I don’t want to think about it too much otherwise I might do damage to myself so we’ll give it a point for its’ music and another for not being completely unplayable because you can actually progress if you stick with it. However, that is not excuse to play it. Avoid at all costs.