Cruz Brothers

A long time ago, there was a perfectly unremarkable fighting game called Deadly Moves for the Sega Genesis. It's the kind of mediocre fighter I normally would have forgotten about, if not for one thing -- when Kaneko went to advertise the game in magazines, they decided to use these terrible hand-drawn recreations of the game instead of actual screenshots. I couldn't help but be reminded of that cheesy advertisement when I first saw the pictures of Cruz Brothers, the brand new fighting game from developer DCF Studios. "There's no way this game can possibly look like this," I thought to myself. But as it turns out, there is a way the game can look like that, and the result is even worse than I imagined.

This is the story of Igor and Felipe Cruz, two aspiring boxers who hope to go from street fighting to the big leagues after teaming up with the legendary coach Marcus Luz. But the road to fame and fortune is littered with obstacles, as the two brothers discover as they are forced to deal with an underground boxing club, sailors, a biker gang and even jealousy. It's a surprisingly long story with more than 40 minutes of hand-drawn cinemas.

Unfortunately, any interest you had in the story is completely thrown out the window the moment you get into your first one-on-one fight. Despite being about boxing, Cruz Brothers is little more than a 2D fighting game along the lines of what Capcom and SNK were doing back in the 1990s. We have a fast punch, strong punch and walking attacks, along with a few special moves that are performed using the typical quarter-circle motion.

As somebody who has never been able to get into the traditional 3D boxing games, I was ready to experience a 2D version with a much faster pace. Sadly, DCF Studios gets almost everything wrong here. From the limited characters to the boring move selection to the way the fighter says "wake up, gangsta" after every special attack, I found much of Cruz Brothers to be unbearable.

Let's focus on just one of the many significant problems with this game. Like a lot of fighters, Cruz Brothers has you charging up a special gauge that you'll use to unleash a super-powerful mega attack. We all know this kind of this is supposed to take out a good chunk of your health, but this game takes it beyond the point of reason. No joke, one of the special attacks will take away 75% of the character's health. That's not insignificant, and it means that every round is a mad dash to figure out who can charge up the most special juice first. This singular focus on special moves makes every fight feel exactly like the last.

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It doesn't help that you're only playing a handful of characters, all of which are boxers. In that sense, Cruz Brothers reminds me more of the original Art of Fighting than Street Fighter II. Don't go in expecting to play a wide variety of unique characters, because everybody pretty much handles the same. Worst of all, nobody kicks. I mean, I get that it's a boxing game, but it really feels like this is a standard 2D fighting game that just so happens to be filled with nothing but Balrog clones.

And then there's that oh-so-deep story we were talking about at the start of this review. Had I left the game muted and simply read the motion comic-style cinemas, I probably would have come out of the game with a more positive impression. But seeing as I made the mistake of leaving the sound on and suffering through some of the worst voice acting you'll hear this year, I feel obliged to bring it up. This is the type of game where the two Cruz brothers seem to have completely different accents and every performance is phoned in. There are takes where they mispronounce easy words and generally sound like they are seeing the script for the first time.

This leads us right into an even bigger problem -- the sound mixing. I don't usually complain about the audio levels in my reviews, but Cruz Brothers forced my hand. From the attract screen to the cinemas, it's plainly obvious that the music and voices are turned up so high that they crackle and distort. I spent the entire time wondering if one of my speakers had died on me, but a quick watch of the footage I captured confirmed that it was the game and not my setup.

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Believe it or not, that's not even the most annoying audio problem. The game has a really hard time loading in cinemas, which results in most of the cut scenes starting with a few seconds of annoying stutter. Of course, it's not just the audio that has problems, but also the gameplay. I was amused that when you knock somebody out, they'll get punched to the ground, stand back up and then fall down again. This happened in pretty much every round of every fight. It's a mess.

I can get beyond the horrendous audio mixing, the terrible voice acting and the stuttering cinemas, but what I can't get past is the borderline broken gameplay. Far too many fights devolve into little more than button mashing until you have the special attack charged up and ready to unleash. It's boring, shallow and no fun to play. Sure it has a genuinely gripping story mode, but Cruz Brothers is still one of the worst fighting games I've ever played.