River City Girls

What it is

River City Girls puts series regulars Kyoko and Misako in the spotlight, sending them punching, kicking and shopping their way through town after their boyfriends are kidnapped — a deliberately tongue-in-cheek premise treated with the same self-aware humour throughout. Developed by WayForward and published alongside Arc System Works, it carries forward the beat-em-up-with-RPG-stats formula the River City Ransom series has been known for since the NES era: fighting in the streets earns money and experience that feed into shopping trips, stat growth, and new moves, layered on top of combo-based brawling combat. It released on 5 September 2019 at NZD 36.99, designed from the ground up as a two-player co-op experience alongside solo play.

Its review corpus, 1,214 in English, sits at a strong Very Positive (1,016 to 198), and the writing throughout consistently credits WayForward's presentation as some of the studio's best work — but a specific, pointed structural complaint runs through enough of the corpus to shape how this game should actually be recommended.

Presentation and writing that reviewers consistently love

The pixel art, animation and voice work draw close to universal praise. One detailed pros-and-cons review opens simply: "high caliber pixel art and great expressions," crediting "funny non-serious story (as expected from WayForward)" and "nice easter eggs and cameos" alongside the visual polish. Another calls the soundtrack "well worth the price" on its own, unable to find "even a single track that is not satisfying." The RPG layer draws real, specific appreciation too — stat boosts, a leveling system, and shopping trips between fights giving the beat-em-up structure genuine progression rather than flat, repetitive combat encounters. Several reviewers frame the whole package as a worthy, faithful evolution of River City Ransom's original hybrid formula, with one longtime fan of the series calling that original game "one of the best games ever made" before praising this entry as a fitting continuation of its ideas.

The co-op gap that stings more than most

The single most pointed, specific complaint in the corpus concerns online multiplayer — or rather, its total absence. "It feels like a cross between River City and Double Dragon Neon so I dig it, but DDN had ONLINE CO-OP and it came out SEVEN YEARS AGO and was also made by WayForward," writes one reviewer, directly comparing this release unfavourably to the developer's own earlier catalogue rather than a competitor's game. That's a meaningfully sharper criticism than a generic "please add online" request — it's evidence that the studio itself had already solved this exact problem for this exact genre years before choosing not to include it here. Multiple reviewers independently note that Parsec, a third-party remote-play tool, is the only practical way to play with a friend who isn't physically present, with one detailed review specifically walking through the workaround for anyone hoping to play remotely despite the missing feature.

Balance and control friction

Beyond multiplayer, two more specific, concrete complaints recur. One concerns economy balance: a detailed review describes health-restoring items as "startlingly scarce and extremely expensive" relative to the money enemies actually drop, creating a punishing resource squeeze that hits solo players — who don't have a partner's shared resources and revival options — considerably harder than the co-op experience the game seems designed around. A separate, unrelated complaint concerns control scheme design: "it uses the same button for nearly everything, from picking items, attacking, picking bodies, moving to the next area," one reviewer notes, describing real frustration when these overlapping uses conflict with each other mid-fight.

A genuine, unresolved combat debate

Reviewers split meaningfully on whether the core fighting holds up under scrutiny. One detailed pros-and-cons list flags "AI easy to exploit after you figure them out" and "less chal[lenge]" as a real weakness once patterns are learned. A separate detailed review goes further, describing combat as simply "meh" despite loving everything else about the presentation. Others push back directly, describing "satisfying moves and combos" and specifically praising "non light-spam combos" as genuinely rewarding once explored — a distinction that suggests combat depth exists for players willing to engage with it deliberately, even if the path of least resistance (repeated light attacks against exploitable AI) undersells that depth for players who don't.

What the achievement data adds

The completion curve across River City Girls's 29 achievements offers a useful window into how the game is actually experienced by most buyers. Early achievements tied to basic story and combat milestones sit in a healthy 56-74% range, indicating most players who start the game engage seriously with its core loop rather than bouncing off immediately. But full completion sits at just 4.9%, with several late-game achievements — including one tied to a hidden final challenge — sitting in the single digits. That drop is consistent with a game whose main campaign is broadly accessible and enjoyable for most players, but whose harder optional content and full mastery are pursued by only a small, dedicated fraction — a fairly typical shape for a beat-em-up with real combo depth that most players don't fully explore, rather than evidence of a design problem specifically.

Weighing the co-op complaint against the base experience

It's worth being precise about what the missing-online-co-op complaint does and doesn't mean for a prospective buyer, since it's easy to overweight a single loud grievance. The base single-player and local co-op experience is, by the wide majority of this review corpus's account, genuinely well made — excellent presentation, a fun RPG-inflected combat loop, and a script reviewers consistently enjoy. The online gap is a real, legitimate complaint specifically for players whose intended co-op partner lives elsewhere, and it's fair to weigh that heavily if that's your exact use case. But it doesn't undermine the core experience for players with a local partner, or for solo players willing to work around the economy balance issues noted above. The sharpness of the complaint in this corpus comes specifically from the unfavourable comparison to WayForward's own back catalogue, not from the base game failing at what it actually set out to do for the audience closest to its design intent.

Verdict

River City Girls delivers genuinely excellent presentation and a fun, structurally satisfying RPG- beat-em-up hybrid that mostly succeeds at honouring its source material. A specific, well-documented absence — real online co-op, something this exact developer already shipped for this exact genre years earlier — is the complaint most worth weighing seriously before buying, alongside real economy and control friction that compound the experience for solo players specifically. Best enjoyed with a local co-op partner and reasonable expectations about remote play.