I am very late for a beating with Treachery In Beatdown City

Becoming a games critic is a great way to think about failure all the time. Oh, you're tormented by that terrible time you didn't do enough? Amateur. The unwritten articles, the uncovered games, the abandoned projects: space-time itself recoils at the black hole of their uncountable billions. I should've stuck to shelving. You know where you stand with a shelf.

Treachery In Beatdown City made me feel this way twice over, thanks to a huge "remix" re-release, and thus a second layer of "Argh, I've left it too long now". Well, what the hell, let's do it now. You like smacking virtual jerks around, right? You like unusual designs and experimental genre fusions? You hate microaggressions? Well now. This is an interesting one.

It's a more cerebral Double Dragon where instead of button mashing, you alternately avoid enemies while action bars refill, then pause time to spend them in a Fallout 3 VATS-ish combo menu, ordering unique attacks with many status effects for preparing later moves or bypassing varied defences. The rhythm and balancing take a lot of getting used to, and a little too much waiting, but mean a long tail and more varied options and fights over time.

"It's seemingly disproportionate in parts because it's another dozen straws on your back"

The surface read of Treatdity ("I, too, have regrets" - Ed) is "three people of colour fight back against racism", and sure enough, your enemies are racist as hell. A lot of it manifests as specific, maddeningly deniable behaviours. Assuming another customer is a cleaner. Interpreting a Black guy's genuine effort to help (really, his mere presence) as somehow sexually threatening. Never accepting any fault. 

But the racism of its many recurring foes is intrinsically bound to attitudes that drive other hostile behaviours. Getting angry at those can seem petty, and that's another frustration in itself, as people fail, or pretend to fail, to understand why you're fighting bougie influencers, culture safari guys, and tech evangelists.

It seems weird and petty to keep bodyslamming joggers and cyclists, but the point isn't that jogging is bad. It's that they don't move out of your goddamn way, about the entitlement of people rolling up with money and giving the residents shit for not kowtowing to their every assumption and whim. They're a face of it.

Beatdown is about having had enough of all this shit. It's seemingly disproportionate in parts because it's another dozen straws on your back, but also, because its devs wanted to have fun with it. Sure, you're fighting systemic racialised oppression, but that's nothing new. This isn't Black Dynamite's friends learning about slavery for the first time. You mobilise because ninjas have kidnapped President Orama, and the rich mayor has suspended the police and called in his private "security" force (which, well. It was never not a topical game). It's a very silly game, often frivolous and self-indulgent. 

Its caricatures are occasionally a tiny bit uncomfortable, and it has little time for white women, which as a stage 4 white woman I have mixed feelings about. But why should it make me feel comfortable? Black creators don't owe me reassurance, or a fully serious and universally relatable tone. Failing to cover a game I've enjoyed for so long is a regret. Leaping to pontificate about how it should cater to me better would be a far more shameful failure to really give it my attention.