Rage of the Dragons NEO – PS5 Review

Rage of the Dragons NEO is a tag-team fighting game port of an original 2002 SNK coin-op originally coded by Japanese devs Noise Factory who also put out other SNK hits such as Sengoku 3, King of Fighters: Maximum Impact and a couple of the later Metal Slug games.  Originally intended as a sequel to Double Dragon, the game was re-tooled in development to make it a standalone title.

Although, Yoshisha Kishimoto, the original developer of Double Dragon had nothing to do with the development of the game there are clear nods to original game.  Two characters, Billy and Jimmy Lewis, are clearly based on the original ‘Dragons’ Billy and Jimmy Lee while various other characters are also present in slightly modified forms.  Most notably, Abubo (originally a boss character, now playable in this version) is clearly based on Double Dragon‘s big lump Abobo.  It’s all a bit of a homage rather than anything official but equally the gameplay has nothing to do with the original game.

Instead of being a scrolling beat ’em up what you have now is a one-on-one fighting game, albeit with tag-team partners that you can swap in and out.  So, yeah, more of a two vs. two situation but really with pairing only using one character at a time if that makes sense.  And really, it plays much like every post Street Fighter II fighting game.  That’s initially apparent from you having a roster of playable characters to fight as with 14 original characters as well as the two boss characters, Abubo and Johann.

The gameplay is more or less what you’d expect too with you having four attack buttons (essentially light and heavy versions of kicks and punches) which control your basic attacks augmented with the standard quarter and half circles and Z movements that control your special moves.  Again, all pretty standard.

On the face of it, this should be a bit of a celebration of a previously well-regarded retro fighter.  The visuals are clean and colourful with great designs for both the backgrounds and the fighters, exactly what you’d expect from SNK in their prime.  At this point we’d like some filters or even a little bit of a glow up to make it look more modern – the game is over twenty years old after all – but it’s all pretty much just a straightforward port albeit with a couple of gameplay tweaks, a training mode and the addition of online play.

There’s one thing that lets the game down though and that’s the outrageous difficulty.  Playing on the default difficulty (Medium 4), we got absolutely cooked in the first bout, the CPU chipping both our fighters down into dust with what felt like a series of unstoppable attacks and a telepathic AI that responded, violently, to anything we tried to do.  Good lord, can you imagine the disappointment if you paid original SNK prices for this game back in the day and then found out that it was like a Mortal Kombat II boss battle on the highest difficulty setting?

The game offers a series of difficulties but even dropping it down to Easy 1, you’ll still take an absolute battering.  You’ll do a bit better and you might even win the odd match but it’s still punishingly difficult.  The original game had a few cheap ways to deal with this and strategies for the bosses but if you’re looking to get by on intuitive play, forget it.  The only key to success here seems to be to learn the exploits.  The other is issue here though is that neither you or the AI do much damage and so fights take ages as you chip away at each other.   And, as such, Rage of the Dragons just isn’t much fun.

To temper that you’ve got couch and online multiplayer, both of which being pretty crisp and playable but both suffering from a shared problem – finding someone to play with.  Maybe you’ve got a buddy who is really into obscure retro fighters but if you’ve not, you’ll be looking to online which is let down by a lack of cross-platform play which means it’s a bit of a ghost town in those lobbies.  It’s a nice to have addition but you’ll need to do try to find players to fight against, maybe even looking at some SNK or fighting game forums to find people.

There are other additions too.  The training mode didn’t seem to add much in the way of actionable training and there’s the ‘Dragon Challenge’ which acts as a survival mode.  That would be a lot cooler if the game wasn’t so difficult but veteran players might enjoy it.

As with a lot of these more obscure retro/arcade ports, what you get here might not be a game that’s for everyone but if you are an existing fan this is arguably the best way to play it.  Sure, you could just fire up your old Neo Geo or play the ROM on MAME or something but having it right there in the console that’s plugged into your telly is definitely better.  Especially if you’ve ever wanted to play as Abubo or Johann (who is apparently an absolute prick to play against in the main Arcade mode).  But that difficulty is definitely an issue and, for us at least, holds the game back quite a bit.