Game Review: River City Girls

A while ago, before the Plague Years, the trailer for a beat-em-up game came out and I thought it looked great. It immediately reminded me of my days playing River City Ransom with wanderluster_kp, punching out the Generic Dudes and picking up their money, playing baseball (meaning one player throws a rock and the other player tries to hit it out of the air with a stick before getting thwacked), trying to figure out the surprisingly-complex progression mechanics--it took us quite a while to realize that you had to backtrack to beat the game and couldn't just always run from left to right--and chowing down on food, box and all, from the stores. Even once we were good enough to beat it, the gameplay kept us coming back, and to this day we both remember it fondly. When I told wanderluster_kp about River City Girls, her immediate response was "Can you play baseball?"

But at the time, I didn't have anyone to play it with, and my life was too packed with other activities to stay home and play games. And then the plague began and the games I did play were all single-player games. To cut this short, sashagee was browsing through the list of games on sale on her PS5 a couple weeks ago and saw River City Girls, and I said, "Oh, that one!" and told her to check it out. She watched the trailer, saw it was half off, and over the last week or so, we played through it.

"Don't mess with us /
We're the River City Girls 🎶"

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