As should be apparent by my many reviews and articles, I am a fan of the beat em up genre. There is just something relaxing about beating up multiple opponents while being a badass. Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Overdrive, a spinoff of the fighting game serves up much of what I like, but there are some flaws.
To begin, this is a fun game. Its intense and fast paced with many enemies to fight and many ways to defeat them. There is a great RPG progression style for the game that encourages multiple replays as well, so we are already off to a great start. I love the many attacks the various characters have and finding new methods and the correct upgrade really helps bring a lot of depth to this game compared to many other beat em ups. Many have compared this to Scott Pilgrim vs The World: The Game, and there is an argument to be made there, but I feel the game goes far beyond that title. This is a full merger of fighting games with the beat em up, something Capcom did previously albeit not to this extent.
There is a bad side to this game however and it is the controls. I must note right now though, that I used the pro controller only for the game as my joy cons are being repaired by Nintendo, and I noticed some things while playing that stuck out to me as hindering the experience. For instance, sometimes while trying to jump, I instead dashed and vice versa. The game uses two planes of movement and requires a button input to transition between the planes, which is good except that on the pro controller, I kept triggering an attack instead which caused no end of frustration.
The faults aside though, I actually had a lot of fun with Phantom Breaker: Battle Grounds Overdrive. There is plenty of replay value thanks to levelling up, a basic arcade mode style of beat em up, and more multiplayer options, not to mention all the characters. I lost hours to this game and still want to play, and considering the flaws I mentioned, that is a testament to how much I liked it. If you like beat em up games, then you must play this!
Disclaimer: A review code was provided.