Riot Zone Longplay (TurboGrafx CD) [QHD]

Game Info
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Developer: Westone
Publisher: Hudson Soft
Year of Release: 1993

Game Review & Impressions
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As soon as I started playing Riot Zone, I was struck with a strange sense of Deja Vu. In fact, I HAD played something very much like it, because Riot Zone is effectively a port, albeit with some changes to character sprites, of Riot City, a 1991 arcade release also created by Westone. Riot City was released on Sega's System 16 hardware, and it's one of the most boring beat 'em ups I've ever played: overly long, with too few moves and little in the way of merit.

Riot Zone is pretty much identical to Riot City, except the lead characters have had their names and artwork changed. Hawk is the spitting image of Axel Stone from Streets of Rage, who was already a facsimile of Cody from Final Fight. In fact, Riot Zone is pretty much a Poundland/Dollar Tree version of Final Fight, featuring stages and enemies that look like those from Capcom's seminal fighter, but are nowhere near as good. In fact, the goons you fight here are all kinds of weird: the elderly Chinese guy with walking cane who looks like he's sucking his thumb; the big guys in the shirts whose sleeves are too long; the wrestlers with elbow pads so tight that the blood flow to their worrying atrophied arms has clearly been cut off.

There's no getting away from the fact the game on which Riot Zone is based was pretty dull and crusty to begin with, and I suspect the reason this got made at all was in response to Final Fight CD, which released on the Sega Mega CD, and is considered as the definitive home version of that particular coin-on. Riot Zone is simply a reskinned Riot City with a cheesy synth-rock soundtrack on a compact disc, and offers little else. It's not a bad game as such, just achingly dull, and one that's unlikely to be remembered with much fondness.

Chapters
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TBC