Final Vendetta is a new beat 'em up from Bitmap Bureau & Numskull Games. It was heavily inspired by Streets of Rage and Final Fight and has many similarities to both of them (more-so SOR). One thing that's different about Final Vendetta, though, is its combat. It gives you a lot of freedom to cancel and chain your attacks together to create super powerful combos. So in that sense it feels closer to Streets of Rage 4 or Final Fight 3, instead of the older games. You have a pretty large moveset, and it's a lot of fun to play around with it, trying to figure out the best options for each situation.
Hard is the default difficulty. Despite the name, it's actually relatively easy to clear since you get tons of lives. You start with five, there's a hidden one to find in every stage, and you get extends at 1 million and 2 million points. But enemies can still do a lot of damage and trap you in a bad spot, so you can still die pretty fast. That's what makes going for a deathless run fun.
There's also an unlockable Ultra difficulty mode. I've only tried it a couple of times, so I'm not sure what the exact differences are. It seems like enemies do a bit more damage, you only get one extra life, and there's no warning for any of the traps. I'll probably move on to that now that I got a good score for Hard mode.
Speaking of which, the scoring and ranking systems seem pretty good in this. It has a similar combo chaining system to Streets of Rage 4, except instead of losing your chain when you get hit, you only lose it when you get knocked down. It doesn't calculate score based on the damage you've done to enemies either, it just goes by the number of hits you did. So the two fast characters are probably going to score a bit higher than the slow and heavy grappler by default. It's maybe a bit too simple, but it seems to work well enough, and it helps make the game more fun. The grade ranks, on the other hand, are kinda harsh in comparison to the chaining. In order to get an S-rank, you can only get knocked down once through the entire stage. Unless you've built up a 200+ hit chain - that lets you take one extra knockdown. That can be hard to build up on some stages, so you really need to be careful if you want those S-ranks.
The developer has been updating the game pretty frequently since its release last week, adjusting the balance and fixing exploits. I've been busy with TMNT: Shredder's Revenge, so I'm just getting around to this. I haven't played the previous versions, but the game feels like it's in a pretty good state right now. I hope they won't go overboard with changes. Personally, all I'd really like to see is a bit more hit-stun on the jumping down+attack for Claire and Duke so they can transition into a grab more smoothly. Enemies recover really fast from that in comparison to Final Fight or Streets of Rage for example. Same for Claire's running+special attack (the knee), a bit more hit-stun to easily follow it up with a grab would be nice. But other than that, I hope they'll just do small quality of life improvements, and not mess with the balance too much. The game's great as it is. I'd definitely recommend trying it if you're a fan of the genre. The price ($24.99) might be a hard sell to casual fans, but it's well worth it in my opinion. I've been enjoying the game a lot. It's currently available on all major platforms.
Chapters
0:00 Intro
0:45 Stage 1 - The Streets
3:46 Stage 2 - The Underground
7:41 Stage 3 - The Elevator
11:30 Stage 4 - Dockside
15:48 Bonus Stage
16:17 Stage 5 - Club Tigre
21:19 Stage 6 - Manor Grounds
27:49 Ending & Credits
Final Score: 4,116,450
-----
Beat 'em Ups (e.g. Final Fight): • Beat 'em Ups
2D Action (e.g. Metal Slug): • 2D Action
STG/Shmups (e.g. Dodonpachi): • STG Replays