A beat them up that thinks itself a bit too clever...
There's not much to be said about beat them ups; by definition they're reduced fighter games that might also offer you a bit of exploration gameplay, that left to right going about that adds another bit of a dimension to it. But even good beat them ups are pretty simple and they rarely can make a dent in serious action sidescrollers. Well, the developers of Gooch Grundy's X-Decathlon thought that they'll fix all that up by making the game a heads up isometric kind of adventure, and, for good measure, they thought that by pitting you against more than one adversary at a time would change the name of the game. Heck, they went as far as to add narration to this, and to put the simple and uninspired gameplay inside a competition theme of sorts. All bells and whistles, all items that one can so easily do without the slightest sense of loss. So, yeah, the game might have wanted to smarten up the recipe but they just ended up adding superfluous elements to it, elements that don't make the game better not by a pinch. Instead, if you want an arena experience, go for the better Megabyte Punch title which simple as it may be is way more fun than this pretentious game here.
