Streets of Rage 4

[h1]One of the Greatest Beat ‘Em Ups of All Time[/h1] Dear GOD this game is good. This is a must own for pretty much anyone who is evenly barely interested in punching the ♥♥♥♥ out of bad guys in video games. Streets of Rage was one of those classic SEGA franchises that was positioned to go toe to toe with Final Fight, and it was a 16 bit console game that put many arcade games to shame. Decades later we FINALLY have a new entry and it is everything fans could ask for. A true refinement and evolution of the genre it helped put on the roadmap back in the Genesis days. The combat in Streets of Rage 4 is PERFECT. I'm serious, it's such an immaculate fusion of kinetic animations, perfect feedback from your attacks, crunchy sound and particle effects, aggressive enemies and bosses, level design that pushes you into dangerous encounters and hazards, and tons of player options without trivializing the enemies. If you're not familiar with with the genre, Beat 'Em Ups have you playing as a character who moves on a 2D plain, punches and kicks everything with a pulse, and is strafing around the enemies and obstacles. You will repeatedly throw the same jab over and over again if you're punching nothing, but if you make contact with an enemy or object, you will continue the rest of your character's combo. You can grab enemies by running into them, which is easier said than done because they will attack if you get in their face, so you're encouraged to either flank them from above or below their X axis, or punching them once to stagger them and hit confirm into a grab. You're going to want to grab enemies a lot because you get i-frames and can throw them into several other enemies. Special moves are where this game differs from many other games in the genre. In Streets of Rage 2, and in the Final Fight games, you throw out a special move when you're cornered and want crowd control or want to do good damage to a tough enemy like a boss. These special moves would cost a small amount of health to pull off, which discouraged spamming them. In Streets of Rage 4, you still lose health when using a special move, HOWEVER, it gets turned into green health rather than going away. If you land hits on enemies, this green health will be restored to your health bar. This means you can spam special moves to do a ton of crazy damage, then play strategically to get your health back up like you never lost any in the first place. But if you get hit just one time by any attack, you lose all your green health. This, combined with the really tense combo scoring system that rewards you with extra lives for maintaining a combo throughout the level, and you have a game that can get very tense the further you get into a level without any health pickups or enemies in sight to regain green health or combo points. Such an awesome system. The game will see you controlling one of four characters (at first) across 12 levels. You have Axel, the all rounder. Blaze, a feisty woman who has excellent juggling potential with her combos and attacks that cover lots of ground. Cherry, a girl with a guitar who is fast and agile. Lastly there's Floyd, the grappler of the group with a cybernetic arm. As you progress through the game, you'll unlock Adam, a character who hasn't been seen since the very first Streets of Rage, but you'll also make progress towards other characters from prior Streets of Rage games. You literally unlock all the playable characters from all three previous games. Yes, that means three different retro throwback versions of Axel and Blaze. This adds so much to the replay value and honestly seems like a no brainer for a long running series like this. Allow the player to unlock older versions of legacy characters with their unique mechanics to do some serious damage in the modern sequel. Seriously, why isn't this a more standard feature in games?! Combine this with the DLC (which is an essential purchase), and you get four additional characters, a cool roguelike survival mode that has a progression system that unlocks variants of each special move for whatever character you play as, an incredible amount of bang for your buck. All of this can be played in coop with a friend (including the roguelike mode), in either story mode, stage select, or arcade mode. Arcade mode has you pick a difficulty, and you go through it with limited lives which you have to earn more of, and if you lose all your lives it's game over. You also have a phenomenal tutorial AND training mode allowing you to practice characters, combos, newly unlocked special moves, or figure out the moveset of that one boss that keeps kicking your ass. It's also fun to go into practice mode and just spawn in an insane amount of enemies and boss types all at once and see the chaos unfold. The only issue some may take with this game is that 12 levels can be a little much for a game in this genre. These games aren't meant to take a month to finish, you're meant to beat arcade games like this in one sitting, albeit with skill and practice. 12 levels can be a tad too long, especially considering that the rooftop level and museum level are both pretty dull and short. Honestly feels like you could cut those two stages and you'd benefit the game's pacing immensely. If the only complaint one can have with a game is that there's TOO much of it, you know you're working with something special. If you ever see this game and its DLC bundled together on sale, no hesitation, no second thoughts, buy it immediately. This is one of the most refined games released this past decade and is something that works for long sessions, trying to master the combat and beat the game on Mania + mode 1CC, or if you're on a lunch break and need to kill 10 minutes with something fast and fun. An absolute masterpiece.