Play any combo-focused fighting game or beat ‘em up for an extended period of time and you’re bound to catch yourself thinking “Damn, I wish I had a second wall bounce!”. There’s nothing more frustrating than developing a theoretically strong combo in the lab and then discovering in practice that you already used up your OTG allowance 16 hits back. Sure, it might break the game if you could loop that EX move a third time, but it would look so cool, right? You deserve that shit, man! This combo is built different! If only you had unlimited ground-bounds, things would be different…

Urban Reign is the furled monkey paw’s fulfilment of this wish. Namco’s spirited attempt at a standalone Tekken Force game is wholly defined by its disrespect for the laws of the known fighting game universe, allowing you to wallsplat, sweep and breaker to your heart’s content - no idea is off-limits here if you have a demented mind that's capable of dreaming in the language of juggling. Lemme tell ya, it feels GOOD to football kick grounded opponents into the wall over and over again until their little polygonal souls leave their body!! Remember when your little brother threw down his PSX pad in a fit of rage because your King combos weren't "letting him play" in Tekken 3? This is a dark resurrection of that feeling writ large and legitimate.

The first dozen or so stages are borderline pornographic in their allowances to smokin’ sick style, making an aggressive argument for why doing damage with a super should allow you to build enough meter for another super than can be cancelled into from the first super. “Why can’t fighting games be like this all the time?” is something you’re bound to ask yourself when the second boss battle against the helpless sap Sick Rick ends with you infinitely hammer-tossing him into a pool table; you can practically imagine the little computer inside your PS2 throwing down its proverbial controller because you made it watch your mastubatory Brad Hawk combo video, packing up its shit and telling its mother you cheated at the game by "spamming too many moves".

But the law of equivalent exchange is alive and well here, and every player-positive design decision requires a reactionary advocate for the equality of CPU rights. Ever commented on EventHubs that “the best way to balance a game is to make all the low tiers as strong as the S-rank characters?” - well, here’s a look at what you could have won. Once the ten tutorials are done and the goons’ gloves come off, this becomes another game entirely. You thought you were safe from all these cheap hands you were throwing out? You’re built different, right? Pure skill? Shhhhhhhhhhhhhit. Sit down. PT-22 is gonna show you how truly broken this game is.

The mid-game of Urban Reign is a fascinating experiment in fighting game design, built almost entirely around how you think up a combo (both in sequence and circumstance) and how far ahead you can take it - given that some enemies can start chain-killing you with their first flick of their wrist, you’re forced to constantly plot random bullshit infinites out of sheer self-preservation instinct, the desire to "style on em" put aside in favour of hiding behind a shelf with dodgy collision-detection in the supermarket stage.

Strings that involve trash bins, jukeboxes, couches, lampposts and a whole lot of running up/suplexing into walls are only the tip of the iceberg here; you will have to go to the deepest, most depraved depths of your fighting gamer's mind in order to out-cheap the cheapest of the cheap shit. Let up for even a split second and it could all be over, and don’t forget that the CPU has the same rights as you do to do Guilty Gear-style bursts mid-combo - meaning no victory in this street war is ever guaranteed for even a second… Did I mention that while you’re being thrown by one enemy, other enemies can still kick you in the head? Damn! And there's no wakeup invincibility or reversal options? God DAMN!

Don't Stop until you reach the top and you'll be rewarded with the only language this game knows - more sadistic pain and suffering. After 99 stages of maverick midtown Marvel 2 madness, what could a final boss possibly look like? Well, the answer's hilariously simple - it's a dude with a gun who can kill you in one shot. Another one of gaming's greatest punchlines. Was it worth it? Hard to say, but this is a once-in-a-lifetime game that's worth checking out for a hot sec, even if you never make it past the karate guy in the 7-Eleven parking lot who can kara-cancel off a sneeze.

N.B. Really sad that this game's rough lil excuse-plot was written by the same guy who directed and scripted the Ace Combat Zero: The Belkan War story. I refused to skip all the cutscenes and intro text because I was expecting Something Clever would happen at some point but no, this is just the narrative equivalent of a Final Fight game where you munch turkeys and beat up guys called Golem and Mr. Motor who say stuff like "Ow! That hurt!" lol