I wanted to like Beat Down so much. There's a lot of cool ideas in this game, but ultimately it is more fun to think about those ideas than it is to actually play the game. But I still respect the attempt to do something interesting with the beat em' up genre.
One of the big features of the game is being able recruit two like-minded criminals to follow you around and help beat up people, but in practice they aren't very useful. Especially if you have to actually play as them, since their movesets are relatively limited. As friendly AI, they mostly serve as just a distraction, so you will only be targeted by some of the enemies in a brawl, which is pretty lame.
I also feel a similar way about having to change clothes or accessories whenever your "cover" is starting to blow, to avoid being jumped by the Mob or the cops. After doing it often enough it just feels like they're just trying to artificially pad out the gameplay. In some of the areas, it's just not possible to move around without being noticed by the enemies. I think if they have a more deliberate way to avoid detection by the cops and the Mob in the gameplay, like being able to "blend in" like in the older Assassin's Creed games, something like this would have worked much better. It wouldn't be a surefire way to avoid confict anyways, since a lot of the missions require combat.
There's some other complaints I have, like the loading screens being too prevalent for a game like this, or the utterly lacking characterization of the main character(s), but there are still some aspects to appreciate here. The structure of the game is very classic JRPG-esque; having small interconnected areas to explore, being encouraged to talk with all the NPCs you see (except the two types I mentioned before), having items like potions spread around the world to find, being able to level up and upgrade your base attributes, and so on. The combination between these two genres is quite fun to see, and because of that I would still recommend people to check this out, mostly just to see it action.
One of the big features of the game is being able recruit two like-minded criminals to follow you around and help beat up people, but in practice they aren't very useful. Especially if you have to actually play as them, since their movesets are relatively limited. As friendly AI, they mostly serve as just a distraction, so you will only be targeted by some of the enemies in a brawl, which is pretty lame.
I also feel a similar way about having to change clothes or accessories whenever your "cover" is starting to blow, to avoid being jumped by the Mob or the cops. After doing it often enough it just feels like they're just trying to artificially pad out the gameplay. In some of the areas, it's just not possible to move around without being noticed by the enemies. I think if they have a more deliberate way to avoid detection by the cops and the Mob in the gameplay, like being able to "blend in" like in the older Assassin's Creed games, something like this would have worked much better. It wouldn't be a surefire way to avoid confict anyways, since a lot of the missions require combat.
There's some other complaints I have, like the loading screens being too prevalent for a game like this, or the utterly lacking characterization of the main character(s), but there are still some aspects to appreciate here. The structure of the game is very classic JRPG-esque; having small interconnected areas to explore, being encouraged to talk with all the NPCs you see (except the two types I mentioned before), having items like potions spread around the world to find, being able to level up and upgrade your base attributes, and so on. The combination between these two genres is quite fun to see, and because of that I would still recommend people to check this out, mostly just to see it action.