Everyone loves vigilantism, right? Okay, cool.
Vigilante is a successor of sorts to Kung Fu Master, another Data East game from four years earlier. It’s an early take on the soon-to-be ubiquitous “beat ’em up” genre, much like Bad Dudes or Double Dragon. Its plot is, uh… surprising?
Huh. Wonder if Madonna signed off on that. I’m gonna go with no.
If you’ve played a game like this before, you should know about what to expect. You move through a 2D environment, beat up guys that want to do the same to you, and pick up the occasional weapon to help you with that goal. After a while, you fight a boss that maybe has some extra abilities or is really big or something, then you repeat that process until the game ends. Vigilante handles the fighting decently well and has very responsive controls, though you should be prepared to die a whole lot. It’s pretty common to get completely surrounded and/or grabbed by enemies that do a ton of damage, which can be pretty frustrating, but it’s sorta the standard of arcade games of this age. You sorta get used to it.
All that said, there are a lot of issues. The game has just five levels, meaning it can be completed in under a half hour (even if you’re using a ton of quarters in the process). There just isn’t a lot of game to this game, as it turns out. Many of the things you expected from a good beat-em-up just aren’t there, either – enemies aren’t especially varied, special attacks and sprinting aren’t there at all, there is no isometric movement in the game’s environments. You can move left and right, and that’s it. Oof.
Games like Vigilante helped pave the way for the beat-em-up genre that we all know and love, but playing them now indicates that, at the time of Vigilante‘s release, a lot of the key innovations were still to come. Because of that, it’s a tough game to recommend unless you’re a big fan of pretending to rescue Madonna from stuff. By that standard, this is probably the best game ever made.
Instead, maybe just play Vigilante 8, a combat racer that is probably not a sequel to this at all.
Of all the games we could’ve gotten for the next Retro Roulette, we’ve landed on my second favorite game of all time for our next entry. I’m pumped, and you should be, too.