KNUCKLE UP

With luscious hand-drawn animations and creative stages, STREETS OF RAGE 4 packs a powerful punch.

Streets of Rage is so deeply ’90s, its main characters are named Axel and Blaze, the kinds of names that made 12-year-olds whisper “whoa, cool”. Streets of Rage 4 is the game I imagine those kids creating if they grew up to be talented videogame developers, and wanted to remake the thing they played as kids. Streets of Rage 4 does not try to reinvent the basics—you walk to the right, you punch guys; sometimes, for a change of pace, you throw them.

Homage is clearly the point here, and it is a beautiful homage: This review could perhaps be the words “Don’t worry, it plays fine” followed by 100 screenshots of Streets of Rage 4’ s characters and stages, and you’d get the point.

The best reason to play this game is to see the fluid attack animations for each character, to be distracted by one gorgeous backdrop after another, to scrutinize each stage for easter eggs and cute little details. The second best reason is to revel in the music, which will be on my shortlist for soundtrack of the year. It retains the series’ synthy vibe while incorporating bits of funk and rock and even dubstep.

I did enjoy the punching and the kicking quite a bit, too, thanks to that great animation and a more complicated set of attacks than the old games. These moves do a great job of expanding on the actions you can take at any given moment, and each character plays quite differently.

Even if it’s not trying to innovate, Streets of Rage 4 is delightfully playful with its stage designs and some little flourishes here and there. In Chinatown, you fight your way through a huge stream of enemies using polearms to keep your distance. In another level, you fight your way down a hallway reminiscent of Oldboy; there’s a sauna with a wet floor that you and enemies both go slipping and sliding across. In a genre this straightforward, even something as simple as a slippery floor can make a stage stand out.

RAGE APPROPRIATE

There are a bunch of difficulty levels and assist options to help you out at the expense of your score. The scoring system often left me frustrated, because it’s how you unlock characters and also how you earn crucial extra lives during stages, but even after several hours I wasn’t completely clear on how it worked. There’s a combo meter for getting hits on enemies in rapid succession, but if you get hit mid-combo you lose all the points you were accruing. Except sometimes I’d get hit and keep the points. It wasn’t obvious what was happening either way.

Even after a few hours with Streets of Rage 4, I didn’t feel like I had a good sense of how to significantly raise my score. It’s fine for a scoring system to judge you harshly and demand excellence, but that only works when a game teaches you how to get better. That’s one area where Streets of Rage 4 really could’ve modernized. It’s also just as frustrating today as it was 30 years ago to scroll a vital healing item off screen, with no option to go back. Would you please just let me grab the damn roast chicken!

Four-player co-op is a nice option and locally it’s smooth as butter, but online, playing with another PC Gamer editor close to me in California, the game was sometimes sluggish. It was still playable, but I could immediately spot the difference. Based on my experience I’d wouldn’t expect it to reliably match the fluidity of offline play.

The limitations of ’90s-era design stand out more when you’re playing Streets of Rage 4 solo. I had a blast in the more chaotic co-op playing with my roommate on the couch. I know there will be people who delight in S ranking every level on the hardest difficulty, but for me, these games are at their best when you’re mashing buttons a lot and thinking a little.

Co-op on the hard difficulty setting gave me exactly that: a three to four hour tour through some beautiful, creative stages, and a soundtrack that will still rule when the next Streets of Rage comes out, even if that takes another 25 years.

Would you please just let me grab the damn roast chicken!