If there are two things I love in my video games, it’s old-school Beat’Em Ups and marvelous pixel art. If there are two other things I love in my video games, it’s badass female protagonists and a slick anime aesthetic. So when Arc System Works and WayForward announced a revival of River City Ransom, but one in which the high school girls are fighting to rescue their kidnapped boyfriends, I was immediately onboard.

Way back in Sept 2013 when I backed my first Kickstarter campaign, it was a game project called River City Ransom: Underground. This was a modern revival of River City Ransom, complete with all the English localization names, by Canadian developer Conatus Creative. While Conatus isn’t around anymore, WayForward brought on Bannon Rudis from that project to co-direct River City Girls, which was a genuinely smart move. Rudis clearly loves the RCR brand and understands what it takes to make a great brawler. Plus, this time around he’d be free play with all the River City/Kunio-kun/Double Dragon IP that Arc System Works currently owns.

Oh yeah, I guess I could probably provide more context about River City Ransom, and its connection to Kunio-kun and Double Dragon, huh? Well, it’s a bit complicated, so please check out our review of Kunio-kun: The World Classics Collection if you’re interested in all that.

RCG is a spinoff of sorts. As such, the designers have eschewed the classic Kunion-kun “blockhead” look and differentiated this game with an original anime art style and appropriately updated character designs. Gameplay is still depicted in pixel art, but this time the visuals look more like a 16-bit game, with incredibly clean sprites and smooth animations. Even the backgrounds are highly detailed pixel art landscapes, with a consistent look throughout. Menu images and animated cutscenes play out in a high-res anime style, which is also very slick.

Like its visuals, the audio side of RCG is also greatly impressive. There’s plenty of voiced character interactions used to move the story forward, and the acting is actually quite well done. And holy crap, this soundtrack is incredible! I would describe the score as mostly synthwave, with some rock/pop-punk, and the occasional full-on chiptune track (usually heard during boss battles). Even more surprising, some of the songs in RCG actually feature full vocals! This is something I’ve never heard in a game like this, and honestly wouldn’t expect to work well. But I’ll be damned, it’s rad AF! Seriously, I think the soundtrack is even worth purchasing on its own.

The basic premise of RCG is laid out clearly within the first 40 seconds of its theme song and can be summed up thusly: Misako and Kyoko’s boyfriends are kidnapped and it’s up to the girls to rescue them, by just generally beating up everyone from one end of River City to the other. This is both a great inversion of the tired Damsel in Destress trope and also a good way to shakeup the massive cast of characters drawn from the Kunio-kun series, plus other Technos titles. (Double Dragon fans will be pleased to hear that Abobo is back, as is whip-wielding Linda.)

Clearly the developers had a lot of fun with this one storywise, as RCG doesn’t take itself too seriously and the game’s journey is super lighthearted. There’s even some genuinely funny humor in the writing, with the quirky cast of characters being well unitized throughout the adventure. There are some real Technos deep cuts to discover here, though I’d image most players will miss them. However, if you do see a character and think, Hey, isn’t that this guy from that one game? then you are probably right.

On the gameplay side, RCG gives you a lot of options in combat without overcomplicating the whole thing. You have two attack buttons, Light & Heavy, which can be strung together in combos, plus a Special attack button. Shoulder buttons are used to block and call out a captured enemy for an Assist attack. (Ah Assists! So under the right conditions, it’s possible for a regular enemy to give up and beg forgiveness, at which time you can capture them. Once captured, you can them out for an assist, Marvel Vs Capcom-style.)

As you progress through town and beat up everyone who crosses you path, downed enemies will drop money in the classic RCR convention. Money you accrue can be used to buy items—usually health-restoring edibles or stat-augmenting clothing items—or to learn new moves from a local dojo. (The dojos happen to be run by Double Dragon’s kung fu brothers, Billy and Jimmy Lee.) Thus by grinding through normal enemies, you earn not only experience points (and level-up!), but can also buy the moves and items you might need to give you an edge in battle.

If you end up losing a fight, however, you will lose about half your money. While this makes sense—the game probably should encourage you to not get knocked out—it can actually be a pain in the ass. For example, if you narrowly survive a boss fight, using up your health items in process, only to the get totally wrecked by a gang of randos outside, you’ll end up losing half of the substantial cash prize just collected from the boss. And it’s not like you can just fight that boss again to make that money up, it’s gone.

Actually, that brings me to my one major complaint about RCG. At least when played single-player, the game is just a tad bit too difficult. Like it makes sense that boss fights could be pretty challenging, but I end up dying fairly often just walking across town. Granted, if I was better about using health-restoring items, I probably wouldn’t get my ass handed to me so frequently. But because I lose half of my money with every defeat, I often don’t have enough funds to buy some bubble tea or whatever after overextending myself one time.

A few of the boss fights also shake up the rote Beat’Em Up formula, introducing “bullet hell”-style projectiles to avoid. The fight with Hibari is almost entirely a bullet hell encounter, and the fight with Noize uses Guitar Hero-esque tabs moving across the floor. While I appreciate the originality, I’m not sure if the Shoot’Em Up elements are actually that fun here. It probably comes down to personal taste, and just how much difficulty you have dodging all those obstacles.

The difficulty does provide extra incentive to play with a friend, as it’s possible to revive your team fallen team if you can act fast enough. Funnily enough, this done by stomping on your friend’s unconscious body and coaxing their soul to return before the floaty ghost ascends into the heavens. While this does look like the worst CPR possible, in River City it will do the trick.

The combat in RCG is pretty great, with some of the unlockable moves being especially satisfying. Misako and Kyoko have completely different movesets, providing unique options in battles, plus double the fun of discovering new techniques. Misako even has the Hop Knee, a launcher attack that should be very familiar to Double Dragon fans, and even comes with the appropriate old-school sound effect. One of Kyoko’s special moves, called “Dragon Feet”, looks very similar to Chun Li’s Lightning Kick, and is just cool as hell.

Personally, I would have liked the option to grab enemies at anytime during a fight, as opposed to only being able to grapple when the enemy is dizzy, but this is a minor gripe. The fisticuffs are fun nonetheless. The variety of weapons you can wield is impressively wide as well, with returning series favorites like the Wooden Plank and the classic Chain, plus off-the-wall options like the Beam Sword and a bigass Fish.

While I really dig RCG overall, that kinda seems like a foregone conclusion. The combination of factors here appear to be custom-made to appeal to my specific personal tastes. From the cool anime-style cutscenes and character design, to the stellar pixel art and slick combat animations, to the generally humorous tone and obscure video game references—plus the shockingly good synthwave soundtrack, complete with vocals? You’ve gotta be kidding me! What more could I even ask for? But even for players who don’t share my game/aesthetic preferences, the quality is so high here that I image most people with greatly enjoy it.

River City Girls is the real deal. So grab a friend, crack some heads, and let’s get the Beat’Em Up revival started!