“You’re still here? Get ready for an encore!”
I like a niche of a niche, similar to what drew me to Astrolancer. I enjoy beat ’em ups, but I especially love beat ’em ups that take place on a single plane — you can go left, you can go right, and you can punch anything coming from either direction. Sure, you lose a degree of complexity by taking out an entire axis of movement. But I’d like to think it distills the genre down into its most bare essentials. If you can’t get moving left and right and punching things down pat, you really have no business making an engaging beat ’em up. Don’t believe me? Try out The Ninja Warriors or 1994’s Mighty Morphin Power Rangers on SNES.
What does this have to do with Bottom-Up Beatdown: Hostile Takeover? Come on, you ought to know by now. Developed and self-published by Bugzsteaks (also known as Donc Games), Bottom-Up Beatdown promises a colorful world full of crunchy sound effects, flying fists, and more combos than you can possibly ever count. I tried out the game’s demo during the Steam Next Fest, and I have quite a bit to say about it.
Character Action in a World Full of Monsters
Bottom-Up Beatdown knows you’re not here for surreal storytelling or deep lore. It’s the near future of 2027, and Biff Steaks — a disgruntled shark-man — is calmly lounging in his cozy home. That is, however, until it’s swiftly demolished by a demolition crew adorned with bright white skulls. With no couch to crash on, Biff takes his desire for revenge into his own hands, slowly unraveling a tense power struggle between gigantic corporations and the enigmatic Sue Flay, a mysterious woman with an equally shady past.
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Things are more humorous here as opposed to serious, which I’m happy to see. The simplistic graphics help carry the lighthearted atmosphere along even further, with snappy animations accompanying brightly colored backdrops and the occasionally witty one-liner tossed your way during battles. The demo even pokes some fun at its own existence during a prolonged battle with Sue Flay, which was nice to see.
But the story and presentation are ultimately secondary to how the game plays. Does it play well? I’d say so. At least, it does so here in the demo.
Things are simple. You have your standard brawler stuff here — a health bar, a special meter, a heavy attack, a light attack, a jump, and a dodge. Where things get interesting, though, is how these things tie together. Your special meter fills up as you inflict damage on foes, and through the use of a directional input with your heavy attack (or the easy special button), you can activate a special attack that has its own unique properties. Biff, for instance, can perform a distance-closing shoulder tackle or a powerful uppercut. Or he can even breathe fire and hit multiple opponents simultaneously. It’s all fun stuff. Doing this along with making or closing space with your dodge, juggling with mid-air attacks after jumping, and keeping enemies close together are all your keys to success.
There’s a big emphasis on maintaining a large combo of attacks in Bottom-Up Beatdown, not only to keep your special meter filled up, but to keep foes disabled in mid-air and inflict heavy stamina damage on bosses. The latter is especially important. Boss battles are often accompanied with large stamina bars underneath their health bar, and after you successfully empty the stamina bar with enough strikes, they’ll enter a temporary stun state where you can really unload on them with little means of retaliation. You can even inflict a similar status effect on the game’s regular enemies, which come in a lot of fun varieties. You have your standard goons, thugs with baseball bats and brass knuckles, gun-toting gangsters, and even sword-wielding foes that can parry your attacks.
You get a chance to play as both Biff and Sue Flay in the demo, and I will say that I definitely prefer Biff’s straightforward playstyle over Sue Flay’s. Not that Sue is a weaker character, at least from what I could tell, but her regular and special attacks just didn’t really match the kind of brawling style that I had acclimated myself to with Biff. Hopefully you’ll get more time to play as Sue in the full game. You’re limited to a single fight if you’re only playing the story mode in the demo.
You can play as either character in the demo’s additional modes, thankfully. I was admittedly surprised to see not only a boss rush available in the demo, but also an “overtime” mode that demands you beat 50 enemies in a little under 90 seconds. It’s a great way to showcase your skills and really put your knowledge of how to juggle foes to the test. I didn’t find the game to be too difficult otherwise, though I’m sure later levels in the full game will ratchet things up a bit more.
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Should You Play Bottom-Up Beatdown: Hostile Takeover?
If you’re a fan of more style-driven, combo-heavy beat ’em up games like Streets of Rage 4 or Fight ‘n Rage, I think you’ll have a fun time. There’s a simplicity here, both aesthetically and mechanically, that I really felt enamored by. It’s the same kind of feeling I had when I was playing BrebreMan. The allure of two-player co-op and a cartoonish set of over-the-top abilities to use only sealed my approval by the time I wrapped things up in the demo.
It’s a different kind of fun compared to something like The Ninja Warriors, even if they’re somewhat in the same wheelhouse. Whereas I like Ninja Warriors for the challenge of it, the need for careful positioning and deliberate use of specific attacks for the right situation, Bottom-Up Beatdown hits the opposite of that for me. It becomes a challenge of how long I can keep a combo going, how many guys can I burn at once with my fire breath, how big can that number underneath my health bar be. I’ll definitely be keeping an eye on this whenever any development updates are posted.
You can check out Bottom-Up Beatdown: Hostile Takeover for yourself on Steam and itch.io.
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