River City Survivors Brings Kunio and Friends Into the Survivors-Like Horde

River City Survivors joins Apple Arcade today and takes the venerable River City franchise into the increasingly crowded but apparently still very hungry survivors-like genre. Arc System Works has assembled more than 20 playable characters, including Kunio and Riki, and sends them into swarms of zombies with support for up to two companions. It is a remarkably logical combination.

River City has spent decades specialising in gangs of tiny angry people punching enormous quantities of other tiny angry people, while survivors-likes specialise in surrounding the player with unreasonable quantities of things requiring immediate removal. Putting the two together saves everybody considerable administrative work.

Randomised upgrades and increasingly chaotic combat provide the progression loop, while the franchise's established cast gives the game more personality than the average anonymous horde-clearing exercise. Its arrival also gives today's Apple Arcade batch some useful tonal variety: subscribers can decorate rooms for Pusheen and then immediately watch Kunio flatten several hundred zombies. Healthy balance is important.

With no advertisements or in-app purchases in the Arcade edition, progression should at least depend on surviving the horde rather than surviving a sequence of purchase prompts.