Double Dragon Gaiden is an attempt to move the franchise's beat-'em-up gameplay into more of a roguelike setting. At the start of every game, you choose two characters. You start with only four but can quickly unlock a significantly larger cast comprised of various bosses and minibosses. You can only play as one character at a time, but you can tag in and out, and each character has their own HP bar, so you effectively get two characters per player instead of one.

Once you've selected characters, you get to choose from one of four different stages. The first level is basic, usually consisting of one stage before you reach a boss. However, each time you defeat a level, the remaining levels get more difficult. Some stages are easier but with harder bosses, while others may have an easier boss but a more punishing stage, so you need to decide between them.

Between segments of a level, you'll can pay money earned in-game to procure a power-up, which can range from bigger health bars to reducing movement lag. Each member of a team gets one chance to get an upgrade, but you have to pay the associated cost for each. Of course, once you get a game over, the upgrades are lost, which is where the roguelike nature of the game comes in.

You can also customize the difficulty beforehand. You can adjust everything from enemy aggression levels to the cost of continuing if you get a game over. Increasing the challenge makes the game tougher but decreases the amount of money to unlock tokens, an in-game currency that unlocks new characters and concept art. Making the game easier means finishing a simpler run, but it reduces the tokens you get. However, the game yields so many free tokens that even playing on easy will provide plenty of tokens for unlocks, so these challenges are more for fun than anything else.

Distinct to Double Dragon Gaiden is the heavy focus on special moves. Every character has three different special moves that they can access at any time. Billy has a variety of different kicks that can dash across the stage or hit multiple enemies. Marian has a sparking ball that stuns everything around her, a rope she can use to toss long-distance enemies, and a bazooka that blows the everliving crap out of everywhere. Unlockable characters have different gimmicks, such as long-distance attacks or powerful moves with a long wind-up.

Using special moves drains the special meter, and you can only use special moves (or tag between characters) when the meter is full. However, this isn't a resource to be conserved. The bar refills very quickly as you attack or take damage, and it slowly replenishes even if you're not doing either. By default, you can't exactly spam special moves, but certain upgrades make it possible to do so. Special moves are going to be the centerpiece of your combat.

Special moves don't just do boatloads of damage. Defeating enemies with a special move earns loot, which is exchanged for items or tokens to unlock more characters. Defeating three or more enemies at once also grants a Crowd Control bonus, which spawns a healing item. The more enemies that are defeated at once, the better the healing item that spawns. Proper use of special moves can spawn a lot of free healing in every single fight. Even if you're at full health, it's worth doing because healing items at full health yield a lot of cash. This changes the flow of the game from defeating individual foes to smashing as many enemies as possible in a single attack.

The downside of the heavy focus on special moves is that it quickly dominates the game. Most characters have at least one special move that is absurdly good, and as you progress and gather upgrades, you can focus on upgrading that one move. Once you get upgrades that do things like make that move 50% stronger or instantly recover all your SP every time you nail a Crowd Control, a good chunk of the game devolves into spamming one move, and the challenge mostly comes from finding the right position to avoid being hit during your move's start-up animation.

This is the most Dynasty Warriors element of the game, and it is fun … at first. Marian pulls out a bazooka and lays waste to entire armies while leaving an endless number of roast turkeys in her wake. Unfortunately, no matter which character I played as, most of my gameplay revolved around spamming the safest special move. Sometimes I'd need to poke with fists to replenish my SP bar, but depending on upgrades, that became a relatively limited thing.

In fact, the bulk of the challenge in Double Dragon Gaiden comes from heavy animations. As mentioned above, some special moves have lengthy start-up animations, and jumping and other movement actions tend to have a lengthy lag associated. Sometimes you can cancel or tag out of the animations, but often, it's just the risk you take. Since enemy damage numbers skyrocket as the game goes up, it further encourages spamming of your safest super move, since those tend to have powerful crowd control or lengthy i-frames.

This sort of keeps Double Dragon Gaiden from hitting the same peaks as something like Streets of Rage 4. Rather than feeling like risk/reward, they feel like the only relevant part of the game. There's too much positive associated with them, and the worst negative is that you might need a few seconds to build them back up again. Bazookaing the entire screen is hilarious the first 100 times, but it loses its luster as you progress.

The game is fun. The wide variety of characters and roguelike design make the game shine early on. While experimenting and figuring out optimal tactics, I was really enjoying it. Over time, the game seems to trend toward super move spamming, that it ended up feeling repetitive. I would neglect things like a character's B-button move. After all, why would I waste my time on grabbing an enemy for small damage when I could dragon-kick them into the Milky Way?

Double Dragon Gaiden has a cute art style that clearly attempts to update the old NES graphics to something more advanced without losing the simple chunky visuals that defined the franchise. The result is an adorable sprite game with some nice animations, but a handful of the character sprites end up looking a little weird. The backgrounds are similarly nice and colorful and contain a lot of nice details and inside jokes. The music is also quite nice and lends a nice atmosphere to the beat-'em-up action.

Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise of the Dragons is a fun little beat-'em-up that scratches the itch of obliterating a ton of foes at once. The roguelike elements and multiplayer provide some nice added value, but unfortunately, it quickly ends up feeling pretty repetitive. It doesn't quite match the absurd polish of something like Streets of Rage 4, but it manages to be a darn fun time nonetheless.

Score: 8.0/10