Streets of Rage 4 Review
It may be a bit stereotypical of me, a guy who writes video game reviews in his free time, but when I was a young kid I thought the local arcade was the coolest place to be. Thanks to an incredible density and variety of games, snack bar, and the fact that my dad was adamant it was far too loud inside, I couldn’t get enough of that place. But then one day my cousin got Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Turtles in Time on the Super Nintendo and it made me wonder why I was paying dozens of quarters, if not dollars, to play games ten minutes at a time when I could play them all I wanted on a home console. Since then, I’ve never been eager to go back to an arcade or arcade games, since they’re usually full of cheap tricks to get more money out of people who don’t know better, a category I typically occupy. Then last week, a new entry in the arcade-influenced Streets of Rage series was released and I thought it was time to reassess my opinion on arcade games.
Streets of Rage 4 is set 10 years after the events of Streets of Rage 3 and the decade has been a peaceful one since pugilistic police officers Axel Stone and Blaze Fielding defeated the nefarious Mr. X and his criminal Syndicate. Unfortunately, Mr. X’s children, the Y Twins, have resurrected their father’s crime empire and are seeking revenge against the people who defied him. To defeat them, Blaze and Axel must team up with former friends and new allies to defeat criminal conspiracies and political corruption the only way they know how: by beating hundreds of people to death with their bare fists.
If I can say one thing in favor of Streets of Rage 4, it’s that the game looks amazing. Everything from the characters to the backgrounds to the special effects all look incredible thanks to the excellent hand-drawn graphics style. What impressed me most is that the entire visual design walks a thin line between realistic and cartoonish so that the game looks like a serious gritty street fight through real-world locations but there’s just enough un-reality that it fits perfectly when Axel punches so forcefully that flames explode out of his fists. The special moves each playable character has are all over-the-top color explosions and it feels genuinely cool to use them because nothing gives a sense of power like kicking a dude with a leg that has somehow become an energy dragon. On top of that, I think the game does an admirable job with diversity and inclusion in its character design. Streets of Rage 4 features heroes and enemies with a wide variety of skin tones and body shapes, including protagonist Floyd who is a double-amputee and my favorite playable character thanks to the devastating blows he dishes out with his prosthetic arms. Though I personally have reservations about the hyperbolically-curvaceous Blaze and her panty-flashing high kick moves, she is far from the only female depiction. Admittedly there are a category of slim female enemies who have decided to enter a street fight in only a tube top and short shorts, but there’s also an equally prevalent squad of badass biker women with larger bodies, but they aren’t played for laughs or presented as unusual, they’re simply ready to piledrive the protagonists through a table.
Unfortunately, the visuals are where my positive opinions of Streets of Rage 4 stop and that’s because it’s less concerned about being approachable or understandable to new players and more concerned with referencing the previous Streets of Rage game, the last of which came out in 1994. This is extremely frustrating because there have been a lot of improvements to video games as a whole in the past 26 years and Streets of Rage 4 doesn’t appear to be interested in any of them. The most infuriating example of this is that players are completely incapable of hitting any enemy that is even one pixel above or below them on screen. However, the enemies in Streets of Rage 4 aren’t affected by this same handicap, providing a petty new level of cruelty towards players perfected by older games to stretch out limited game content which, at around three to four hours long, Streets of Rage 4 definitely qualifies for. Along these same lines, in order to do their more powerful special attacks, players must sacrifice some of their life. This health can be won back by attacking enemies, but if the player is hit before they can recover, that health is lost in addition to whatever damage the player takes from the enemy attack. Finishing out this trio of irritation is that, should a player die anywhere in a level, they have to restart the entire level again. This is less painful in earlier levels as they’re shorter, but it becomes a true menace once players progress to levels with multiple challenging boss and sub-boss encounters. I know there are people out there who will dismiss this by claiming it’s how these games have always been and to those people I say the future should be an improvement on the past.
Speaking of the past, another potent sticking point for me with Streets of Rage 4 is that this game very much expects players to have played, or at least know the finer points of, the previous Streets of Rage games. I have never played any of the previous games in the series, which meant that there were mechanics in this game I never knew because the tutorials had assumed I had and didn’t want to waste time explaining things it clearly thought I should already know. It’s clearly explained that as players earn points, they get closer to earning extra lives for that level, and that players earn more points by doing damage faster in combos. What isn’t explained is that, should a player take any amount of damage before they take a pause to “cash in” their combo, all of those points would be lost. This means that a player can rack up a bone-shattering 30-hit combo but get no points for it if they’re struck by even the weakest slap. As I was too busy trying to keep my character alive and the enemies dead, I didn’t have the spare attention to notice these unannounced point losses and was at least half way through the game before I discovered it and changed my tactics. Another omitted piece of vital information is that, if a player is ever sent flying by a particularly powerful attack, they can catch themselves before the hit the ground, getting right back into the fight instead of laying in a vulnerable heap for several seconds. I had no idea this was possible and actually only ever did it once but never figured out how I did it. I was deeply annoyed by this oversight because there were at least three levels I failed thanks to the damage I took while unable to defend myself on the ground. Yet, the weirdest way this game relies on players to be fans of the series is that all of the unlockable characters are characters from the previous games. Strangely, these characters have received no updates to their visual or audio design and are presented how they looked and sounded back in the 90s, which is to say bad. I assume long time fans of the series will think this is cool, but to me these characters were awful blotches of obsolete technology in an otherwise gorgeous looking game. Not that I think making new characters for a game is easy, but I would have much rather the developers spent their time and energy making playable characters of the game’s various boss characters, especially since two of them, Axel and Shiva, are playable in their Streets of Rage 3 forms.
I imagine if you are a die hard Streets of Rage fan, you bought Streets of Rage 4 as soon as it was available and aren’t reading this review. However, if you’re not, I can’t think of a single reason why you should buy this game. All Streets of Rage 4 brought me was frustration wrapped in cool visuals and I was never once happy while playing it. If you’re really desperate for a multiplayer beat ‘em up game, go buy Castle Crashers Remastered, it’s $10 less than Streets of Rage 4 and is at least twice the game in terms of game length, unlockables, and overall fun.
Don’t buy this game
As much as I hate to say it, there’s nothing here worth spending your money on
