This little anecdote may betray my age, but my only real exposure to the Double Dragon series came with a collection of Pogs that my grandmother bought for me from a yard sale when I was younger. My side-scrolling beat-em-ups of choice as a kid were Streets of Rage and Golden Axe, with Revenge of Shinobi thrown in if I felt up for more of a challenge. Loading up Double Dragon IV and seeing the title screen took me right back to these early-to-mid 1990s gaming sessions, and for better or worse, the entire experience of Double Dragon IV harks back to this era of console gaming.
Initially, Double Dragon IV only allows access to the story or two-player duel modes, with a tower mode unlocking once you’ve beaten the main story for the first time. I wasn’t really aware of the Double Dragon canon, aside from the protagonists being two brothers seeking to rescue their girlfriend, but to be honest, this lack of familiarity didn’t really matter, as the story on offer here is minimal at best, with Billy and Jimmy starting in San Francisco and ending in Japan, beating anonymous foes up along the way. That’s pretty much all there is to it, with the occasional named character seeking to give reason to the brothers’ movements, but failing to deliver any sort of narrative depth.
Admittedly, Double Dragon isn’t the type of series you look to for a solid narrative, with the beat-em-up gameplay serving as the main basis of the experience. Combat is comprised of three buttons: jump, punch and kick, with directional inputs providing a small amount of modification to these inputs. It’s by and large a fairly reductive experience, with hammering buttons serving about as much use as attempting to plan your attacks, and this isn’t helped by particularly stupid enemy AI and multiple occasions of feeling spammed by groups of enemies at once. Double Dragon IV is frequently a game that feels either too easy or drastically unfair, and by the end of the game it feels like merely brute-forcing your way through a level has more chance of success than attempting to learn any form of strategy or improving your skills.
The main story is comprised of twelve different chapters, and with the too-easy/too-hard dynamic mentioned above, it can feel like Double Dragon IV can either take half an hour to complete, or hours upon hours if you fail towards the final hurdle. There are a couple of options to alleviate this, which are strangely not mentioned at all within the game, and only browsing information about the game online revealed them to me. Firstly, the config menu allows you to assign a couple of stronger attacks to various buttons on the controller, which seem by default to be ignored, and secondly, pressing the Options button on the main screen allows you access to a level select screen, which can be a great help later in the game when you’re being cheesed by hideous platforming sections or increasing numbers of enemies. Double Dragon IV feels at times to be a game designed to maximize the number of quarters being fed into it in an arcade, not a game to be enjoyed while sitting on the couch at home.
Throughout my entire experience of playing Double Dragon IV, I couldn’t shake the feeling of the title being a cheap cash-in designed to prey on the nostalgia of older gamers. Perhaps the best way to explain it is that Double Dragon IV is almost a perfect example of the disappointment you feel when you load up an older game for the first time in a while, and the experience on screen in no way matches the experience that you remembered in your mind. In a way, this is an interesting approach, as it certainly does feel as if someone has travelled back in time and snatched a copy of a game designed for release in the mid-1990s. However, that doesn’t mean that this makes for a pleasant experience in 2017. It’s visually unattractive, mechanically frustrating, and overall leaves a bad taste in the mouth.
I wanted to like Double Dragon IV, I really did. The title screen took me back to being a kid, playing videogames with my brother and some friends, and the first couple of levels evoked a feeling of nostalgia in me that few games manage to. However, I managed to beat the main story in a couple of hours, and by then I was well and truly fed-up. Double Dragon IV feels cheap from start to finish, and doesn’t feel as if there has been any improvement in the experience from the days of the NES or the Genesis. Usually my reviews of games that I didn’t get on with end with some sort of qualification, where I state that there are some redeeming features, should people be willing to overlook them. In the case of Double Dragon IV, there really isn’t much that I can recommend. You’d frankly be better off playing one of the whole host of other options available to you, and pretending that Double Dragon IV doesn’t exist.
