Created by the recently formed Nalua Studio, Vengeance Hunters is the first game from the team, and they went above and beyond nostalgia with this one. Developed from the start for the Neo Geo, a console that will be celebrating its 35th anniversary next year, the game doesn’t promise an authentic arcade experience. It is an authentic arcade experience.

Vengeance Hunters is, at first glance, your typical MVS beat ‘em up. Big sprites, great music, characters with clear voices, and some of the best pixel art any 16-bit hardware could deliver. But aside from that, there’s a lot under the hood. Vengeance Hunters have the advantage of years of beat ‘em ups and fighting games to get inspiration from, which makes this Neo Geo game so unique. Let’s be honest here, aside from one or two games… Ok, aside from Mutation Nation and Sengoku 3, the Neo Geo was never a good place to find the hottest beat ‘em ups. In regard to this, Vengeance Hunters is in a pretty good position, and the game looks promising enough based on what has been shown so far.

If you haven’t seen the trailers and many gameplay bits the developers have shared around, I suggest you look for them after reading this article. I can assure you words won’t do justice to what you’re about the see. First of all the game looks fantastic. There’s no controversy about how capable the Neo Geo is when handling pixels, but the whole thing looks phenomenal. More than that, it looks unique. If you take a look at the Neo Geo’s catalog, you will notice that all beat ‘em ups follow a similar trend.

The characters have generally realistic proportions, and the overall look of the games fluctuates between realistic and anime-inspired. Vengeance Hunters goes in a completely new direction with a Saturday morning cartoon look that is a blast to see. The characters have cartoony proportions, and the colors, in both characters and backgrounds are very alive. Everything moves smoothly even when the screen is filled with enemies. Honestly, I only played the Windows version, but since this is the ported version, I believe the performance is the same on the Neo Geo.

When it comes to the gameplay, the game feels incredible. You have three characters to choose from, Loney, Golen, and Candy, They are your typical beat ‘em up trifecta, the all-arounder, the grappler, and the quick and weak girl, but here they all have a lot of maneuverability and, more than that, a lot of aerial attacks. Again, you can see in the videos how the developer keeps the enemy on the air most of the time, juggling sometimes entire waves to dispatch them quickly. It’s fast-paced gameplay like the ones we never saw on the console. The variety of enemies is also pretty good, with tons of different monsters and foes and, most importantly, lots of huge bosses.

Check out more images in the gallery above.

Vengeance Hunters will have 5 levels, divided into 2 or 3 sublevels, and local co-op for up to two players, for reasons that don’t need too much explanation. The game will be out this October 28th, just in time for Halloween, and it will be available for Steam, Xbox, Playstation, and Nintendo Switch. The Neo Geo version according to one of the developers “will come out when we have all the physical stuff to ship”, which sounds fair. 

You can expect a full review from me, coming to this site, pretty soon so, keep an eye out on this site. 

You can wishlist the game here:

In case you missed it, here’s the developer Stream:

An old preview I made, in case you need more Vengeance Hunters: