Double Dragon Advance Review (Marginal)
Double Dragon Advance is the best Double Dragon game ever made. If ArcSys was smart, they'd iterate on this for any future sequels.
It's the pinnacle of sandbox brawlers. Freeform combo systems without a reliance on canned dial a combos (which never work well in games vs mobs) , environmental interaction/manipulation, and enemy behavior changing up so that no run is the same, and you can get them to take each other out means the game is fresh across countless replays.
Add in the survival mode, and there's tons of gameplay to be wrung out of this game.
In terms of the overall package, it's still a GBA game at the end of the day, but you can bump up the resolution to 1080p and add in scanline options to take the edge off some of those giant pixels. Minor quibble on these options for me is the game wasn't designed for a CRT, rather a dim LCD panel, so an overlay that better approximated the true design intent behind the game would be nice as well. Three aspect ratio options are offered with one of them being fill meaning there's only two useful options.
Audio options are weird. You can opt to crush the highs or the lows if you want. (Simulating covering the GBA speaker with the palm of your hand or something?) The enhance audio option is very welcome however since the base GBA audio is on the scratchy side.
In all, its a functional albeit spartan package supporting an excellent game that's well worth getting if you like beat 'em ups at all. Note: As of the time of this review, the game runs at an uncapped frame rate, so you will have to cap the frame rate to 60fps if your monitor has a refresh rate higher than 60hz. Annoying, but fixable with quick tweaks in your respective GPU's control panel.