Hot on the heels of Ninja Gaiden’s own 2D revival with the excellent Ragebound, Double Dragon Revive comes off more like a tribute band for the series rather than a proper reunion tour. It doesn’t play the hits how you remember it, instead putting its own spin on things – from how it looks, to how it sounds, to how it plays. All of those aspects not only fail to live up to my admittedly mild expectations for a new Double Dragon, but after hours of its out of tune meandering, started to cement the idea that maybe we should put a little more distance between attempts to revitalize this series.

Even though I’ve been playing these games for most of my life it’s sort of jarring how straightforward Double Dragon Revive is. Side scrollers of this arcadey, “belt scroll” variety have found a lot of ways to spice up the “punch your way to the right” recipe, and Revive seems interested in keeping as much of that new seasoning away from its plate as possible. It’s a basic protein packed with eight non-branching levels, accompanied by starchy combat that’s filling but has barely any sauce.

Picking up any of the four playable characters is simple and intuitive, with normal attack strings that can be mashed out on one button alongside special attacks and hyper blows that can be used to punctuate these combos, or in some instances extend your offense into wall bouncing juggles. All of these actions are unique to each fighter. Well, Billy and Jimmy Lee have distinctions that don’t translate into mechanical differences, but former damsel-turned-headkicker Marian and ninja frenemy Ranzo have attacks that are a little more flashy and utilitarian. I rarely felt it necessary to use more than basic combo loops on Normal difficulty, though. As long as an enemy didn’t have an annoying shield or hyper armor protecting them as they wound up a big attack (something ubiquitous in the later levels), they were reliably vulnerable to a good old fashioned fist to the face.

There are limited options for those who do want to attempt to style on these street thugs, but they all rely on bouncing enemies off of walls to keep them in the air long enough to string more hits together as they come down. It often felt like enemies kind of just went wherever they wanted after a launch or a throw as opposed to where you directed them to go, making a laborious task out of trying to set up simple combo extensions, jamming enemies into background environmental hazards that take them out of the fight instantly, or taking advantage of the super powerful wall strike and wall crash options.

There’s no air combos to be had either, so chasing a launched bad guy skyward only allows you a single, disappointing smash down to earth so you can wait for them to stand up and let you hit them again. Everyone can get a free hit on downed enemies, if you can finagle the finicky button prompt to do so that is unresponsive and unreliable. If there’s the right kind of wall around – the right kind being the one they decide is right based on no reliable context clues – you can do a super sized air dropping attack, but even getting the wall kick off that’s required to get the requisite height is a dice roll.

Everyone has powerful, screen clearing finishing blow attacks that are charged up by all the fisticuffs, with boosts given when you make a timely dodge, counter an enemy’s big attack, or grow your combo meter. But no playable character, not even with Ranzo’s cool explosive kunai or Marian’s charging knee, can make Revive’s combat feel special, or even interesting, across long stretches of time. It took me around three hours to finish my first playthrough, and I lost interest well before then, with three more playthroughs after that, one for each playable character.

That said, enemy variety is at least diverse and effective at making you use the small menu of options you have. As levels progress, old bad guys show up to mingle with the newer ones to form a sort of street thug gumbo that can get a little spicy towards the end of your run. It’s largely a numbers game, with you often getting overwhelmed by the sheer amount of incoming blows from all angles. I liked the little brain puzzle of having to identify the most dangerous threat to take out first, or needing to figure out the most efficient way to wrangle as many folks as possible into a big attack, but it wasn’t beguiling enough for me to forget that the process of breaking these dudes down was still rather dull. Even the array of limited use weapons, though strong tools usually worth the effort to grab if things get hairy, are your standard fare knives, two-by-fours, sledgehammers, etc.

As the challenge escalates, some of Revive’s jank becomes an enemy of its own. Small things, like the direction of your character sometimes defaulting to the opposite direction inexplicably, stops being a quirk to work around and starts being the reason you drop a combo or get punished.

Bosses break the monotony up a little bit, introducing slightly more engaging stage hazards and pattern mechanics, like Linda, who you need to shake off of the pillars she’s hiding on top off before you can attack her directly. These get pretty brutal towards the end, though, specifically the chapter seven boss, which has to be the most aggravating fight I’ve maybe ever played in one of these games – truly a test of endurance against a ceaseless onslaught of the most cheating cheaters the game has to offer.

There’s not a lot of flash visually, either. Most character models look good, but the fire, wind, and dragon effects that come from their limbs when channeling their chi looks a step behind in quality. Camera work and sound design come together adequately to make big hits feel good and all that jazz. The sound track is decent, with a handful original riffy rockouts and remixes of old series jams that sound good in the moment but sort of leave your head immediately after they end. Overall, Double Dragon Revive lacks the visual identity that the 16-bit Double Dragon Gaiden and even pastel-punk Double Dragon Neon have, let alone its peers like Shinobi: Art of Vengeance and Ninja Gaiden: Ragebound from this year.

The stages you bash your way through run a much broader gamut. A colorful Japanese pagoda-style tower with a fun little perspective shift mid-way through is simple but much more stirring than a non-descript highway level, even if there is a wrestling ring at the end of it. Some of these zones require some platforming that I was never happy to see but in mercifully short bursts. It’s a bit of an eye-roll that most of these stages are just takes on series staple locations without much novel flair added this time around, but it’s truly disappointing how many of these locations are just bland and lifeless.

And not to be one of those “the story in this beat ’em up sucks” sort of freaks, but I mean, it does. It’s less that the plot is nonsense, the characters are bland, and the writing is lousy and more that Revive lacks the confident and chaotic energy that is necessary to sell this sort of thing to begin with. The post-apocalyptic villain of Neon was a gang-leading demon knight straight out of a heavy metal album cover named Skullmaggedon. The gang struggles in Gaiden made that version of New York City feel like Gotham City, complete with goons color-coded and themed after their outlandish bosses. By comparison, Revive is just a completely tame and underwhelming take on returning villains Willy and Raymond, who used black magic and the military industrial complex to experiment on people and make the Sousetsuken kid’s lives worse.