Tokyo Beat Down is awesome. Note the absence of the word "good."
You play the game as a character named "Lewis Cannon" (say it good and slowly), a no-nonsense cop on the streets of Tokyo who works for an agency called the "Beast Cops." They're the cops tasked with using whatever means necessary to get information and to stop crime. For you, as the player, this means a lot of punching and kicking, because Tokyo Beat Down is every coin-op beat-em-up wrapped into a nice package (also, I guess, technically a shoot-em-up too, as the game has no compunctions about letting you pull out your gun to take down groups of random criminals. Miranda rights be damned!).
I've forgotten one key ingredient here that makes this game very, very different from every other beat-em-up that you've ever played, and it's that this game was made by Atlus. Yes, that Atlus, the Shin Megami Tensei Atlus, the Persona Atlus, the Atlus that has no qualms about including a FLAMING CHARIOT DRIVEN BY A GIGANTIC PENIS as an enemy in one of its games. Generally, people don't think of arcade style action games as being Atlus' bread and butter (and I certainly didn't, before this game), and that's probably still true, but rest assured that the brazen weirdness of their other games comes through in this game, mostly through hilarious and occasionally surreal dialog.
See, the game is incredibly self-aware as both a game and an homage to rough and tumble 70s action flicks. Lewis frequently has lines such as this one, when he's beating up thugs on the third floor of a department store – "It's half off ladies lingerie… and off justice!" It's so rare for games to include such over-the-top and quirky characters, and this game delivers them in spades. Not just the flippant, arrogant Lewis, but also his ice cream-loving partner Riko and his non-violence-obsessed apprentice Kago. They're perhaps caricatures, but they fit into the overall tone of the game perfectly. And the game really is hilarious.
Moreso than that, though, the game hits at some nerves through some sublime use of satire. The game makes it plainly clear that while Lewis' approach is seemingly effective, that police brutality is a serious issue, and that you as the player are now compliant in it. That's not to say that this is a central thesis of the game – it's much more concerned with being hilarious and awesome, often having huge text saying "You Beat Them Down!!" – but the undercurrent is certainly there, especially with the exchanges between Lewis and Kago. I really feel that forcing you to either stop playing the game or to be complicit in the complete destruction of every line of the Geneva Convention is far more effective than having shoehorned in "morality choices."
Another aspect of the game that impressed me enormously was that the game was so tied to a real, physical place. The game faithfully (for the DS, anyways) recreates several areas of Tokyo, and not just the tourist-y ones. This is a game that really is all about geography, and all about Tokyo, in its vastness and its potential seediness. And despite the fact that the game does have some of that Atlus weirdness, Tokyo is surprisingly faithful to its real-life counterpart. Sure, perhaps there's not gangs of roving thugs getting the shit beat out of them on the street, but neither does the game make Tokyo into some garish nightmare world – it's as much a part of the whole as Boston is to The Departed, or Paris is to Amelie.
You might have noticed at this point that I've talked very little about the game itself. That's because, well, unfortunately it's not that great. Oh, it's totally serviceable, offering up punching/kicking/shooting/blocking combinations, but there's a number of problems too. Namely that while the game itself is fluidly animated, the fighting is awfully stiff. It can be hard to line up Lewis with the enemy from time to time, too, meaning that you can spend a lot of time punching and kicking at air. The other problem is that this is the only part of the game that you participate in. You don't get to be Lewis, really, you just get to be his fighting coach, meaning that the game gets pretty repetitive. If the fighting were more fun, this wouldn't be a problem, but just be forewarned that it won't be the fighting that'll make you want to keep playing the game.
Oddly, the game reminded me a bit of Red Dead Redemption in that respect (a game that we'll have a review of very shortly). Like RDR, this is a game that I appreciated, and even came close to loving, not for anything to do with it as a game, but because of all those ancillary reasons I've listed above. That makes it a hard recommendation, but I think that if you do see this game around for cheap, you owe it to yourself to see whether you'd enjoy it or not. Besides, those thugs aren't just going to beat themselves down.