This game was reviewed on Xbox Series X.

Now some of my all time favourite games are Final Fight by Capcom and Streets of Rage from Sega, and over the last few years the scrolling beat em up has been very slim indeed but hopefully Raging Justice from MakinGames lives up to its stellar looks and style.

So this is another one of them 90's inspired games where the developer has tried to add a little of the modern game design into Raging Justice, and to be fair I believe they have really done a great job with this. The game moves well and not too slow that have hampered so many of these games over the years. Here everything is super smooth and swift.

Keeping with the retro style the story is played out with still panels with text and while even Zelda has gone full voice acting after over 30 years, so if Nintendo can change maybe MakinGames could have added a nice cartoon style presentation. But I also understand that this is a budget release for around £10 so as long as the game looks good and plays well what more could you really ask for?

The developers have really tried to add some replay value here as at the start of each stage you have some objectives to complete, you can still finish the level missing some of these but you get bonus points in doing all that you can. They have even added a good cop bad cop system. In this you can arrest thugs when they are dazed but also if you kill them you get the bad cop points. This is a good fun system but when the screen is full and I do mean full of enemies it can be very hard to arrest these and you can very easily accidentally end up hitting the dazed thugs and loose out on all the good cop points.

There are 3 levels of difficulty in the game Wimp is actually fairly hard then Normal is very hard and finally Tough Guy is only advisable for people wanting a real challenge. I wouldn't say the game is hard in a because of difficulty but because of large swarms of enemies as if you get hit from behind you can get caught in a little loop and just keep getting hit until you fall down or run out of energy and die.

While the backgrounds look nice there isn't much animations going on but everything looks very nice and sharp, the characters now these do look modern. These are some very big chunky sprites kinda reminds me of hi-res Neo Geo sprites. They all move smoothly and have nice animations you can select 3 main characters Rick Justice, Nikki Rage and Ashley King these all look very varied then you have all enemies on screen and these can get massively over crowded and no slowdown in sight.

One of the most fun aspects from this game is just how fun it is to pick up one of the varied weapons be it a baseball bat or axe there is a very nice sound effect with every hit. So we have a very nice art style and a nice fast moving scrolling beat em up, and while I can't say it will get anywhere near Final Fight for me but I will say this is maybe the best scrolling beat em up in the last 10 years. This is arcade action at its finest.

David Cameron