The Asskickers Review

We often come across games that suck- downright suck. I will name no games here today, but I will say this- no game I have ever played has sucked as much as The Asskickers. It tries to be bold and old school and innovative, whereas all it is is boring and old and unimaginative. This game is not worth a purchase. It’s not worth a rent. I could have given it a 0/10, but I cannot, because unfortunately, 1/10 is the lowest score that can be given to a game on our scale.

The Asskickers is an old-school beat-em-up game, where you move in a single side-scrolling direction and beat enemies to hell and back. You can choose from three characters, catering towards different styles of play- speed, strength and balance. Except there’s one little problem- you can’t use combos. You just have to keep thrashing buttons and keep hitting your enemies until they die. No combos in a beat-em-up can be a huge letdown.

You can also pick up boxed and crates and stuff to throw at your enemies- except you cannot. While the game does allow that, most of the times, it will glitch and you’ll just be standing in front of an object, pressing the “pick up” button, but you’ll just be standing there, while the enemies will come and thrash you to the fiery depths of Mordor.

Add to that the game’s AI is really cheap, and it seems as if the game is conspiring against you all the time, as if it takes sadistic pleasure in seeing you writhe with anguish and frustration. The A.I is, as I said, really cheap. Often, they’ll knock you down and trigger unavoidable attacks that eat up an entire chunk of your health. Every time you die, you have to start from the starting of the mission. And you’ll die a lot. The game is so darned difficult, you’ll probably have to play it on easy. Now, I have no problem with difficult games, but The Asskickers’ difficulty is, again, really cheap. If the game actually posed a challenge (and was, you know, fun), I wouldn’t have minded the insane difficulty.

Of course, you wouldn’t want to return to such a game, because of the fact that it sucks bad. And the “Survival Mode” and “Time Attack” mode and the co-op mode do nothing to improve on that. They’re all as broken, frustrating, boring and repetitive as the game itself.

The environments are repeated, though the comic book art style is actually pleasing to the eye- about the only good thing in the game. The sound really sucks, though. There’re a select few soundtracks that keep playing the background. At one point, I wanted to chop my ears with an axe. Add to that that the sound effects aren’t very good either, and you’ve got poor production values overall. Every time you punch/kick/hit somebody, the sound produced is very unwieldy, and it ruins the combat all the more.

The same enemy types will be repeated throughout the game, the only change being their costumes. They’ll come at you with baseball bats or some other weapon and try to kill you. The glitches of the game do nothing to make up for any of the flaws. Often, you’ll have to restart an entire level because you or one of your enemies get stuck outside of the level geometry. It’s really frustrating when you have to do that when you’re more than halfway through the level, especially when you’re near the end, and have a good score going.

Overall, you really shouldn’t waste your time on The Asskickers, unless you want to torture yourself to death. Repetitive gameplay, bad sound, boring combat, unimaginative mechanics, and flat out boring gameplay are barely the main cons of the game. There are other, much better beat-em-ups in the market. Go play them. Just don’t play this one.

This game was reviewed on the PC.