Review: Streets of Rage 4 Hits Hard and Soars by Looking to the Past

It’s the best kind of retro throwback, reminding us how hard these kinds of games could hit.

Streets of Rage 4
Photo: Sega

With side-scrolling beat ‘em ups quietly enjoying a renaissance, it was a matter of when, not if, Streets of Rage would make a comeback. And like Sonic Mania before it, Streets of Rage 4 suggests that Sega knew that the best way forward for the series was to look to the past. Indeed, this game feels as if it’s taking care of unfinished business, as it doesn’t chase modern glory in order to prove itself. In short, Streets of Rage 4 is the gratifying sequel that fans of the iconic series should have gotten 20 years ago.

The game is set 10 years after the events of the divisive Streets of Rage 3. Series baddie Mr. X is now dead and his two silver-haired children have taken over the family business, letting street gangs run amok, buying off the police force, and amassing incredible amounts of stolen wealth. But standing in their way, as always, are ex-cops Axel Stone and Blaze Fielding. They’re also joined by series favorite Adam Hunter, his hard-rocker daughter, Cherry, and wrestler Floyd Iraia, the newest cyborg creation of Streets of Rage 3’s Dr. Gilbert Zan.

Visually, Streets of Rage 4 diverges from the Sega Genesis-era dance-club aesthetic of prior games in the series, adopting a hand-drawn animation style straight out of a graphic novel, recalling another Genesis beat ‘em up, the wildly ambitious Comix Zone, in the process. The game’s art style manages to hold onto a lot of the urban roughness that has always defined the titles in the series, while also managing to heighten the wilder flights of fancy when it comes to eclectic enemies and the characters’ special moves. All of these elements feel more at home here than they would have if Streets of Rage had suddenly decided to ape Max Payne.

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As in the prior games in the series, the soundtrack goes a long way toward elevating Streets of Rage 4 above its pulpier elements. Beginning with 1991’s Streets of Rage, composer Yuzo Koshiro has been integral to the success of these games, infusing ’90s dancehall beats, jazz, R&B, and 80’s-action-film ambience into his scores, grounding the games in a modern, urban soundscape even as the content took itself less seriously. The same heavy lifting is on display here, though Koshiro is only one of a half-dozen composers responsible for the soundtrack. If nowhere else, Streets of Rage has very much been brought up to modern standards with this release, with an EDM/hip-hop-infused soundtrack that could be playing out of a tent at Coachella at three in the morning, and without ever feeling out of place.

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Otherwise, Streets of Rage 4 is mostly business as usual for the series, with players needing to walk left to right and smack the hell out of anyone in their path. The vast majority of enemies are cut and pasted from the prior two entries in the series, but the core combat still feels impactful, with success relying on getting close enough to enemies and maximizing the opportunity to inflict incredible amounts of screen-shaking, window-breaking damage.

In the end, there are only a couple of new elements thrown into the mix: enemies can be juggled in mid-air through combos, each character has a flashy new area-of-effect special move that can clear a room, and a bit of lost health can be regained by fighting without taking new damage. Those are welcome additions, but they don’t represent a fundamental shift in how you play the game. Of course, that’s not necessarily a complaint, especially given that Streets of Rage 3 represents the last time this series strayed too far from a winning formula.

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What that ultimately means is that all of this game’s strengths and weaknesses are largely the same as those of Streets of Rage 2, the series’s strongest entry. Though Cherry and Floyd are well-designed—Cherry in particular is the kind of character people of color don’t usually get to inhabit—there’s no denying that they’re basically Skate and Max from Streets of Rage 2 but with a fresh coat of paint and one or two new moves. The surprises here lie mostly in some imaginative art direction; for one, an art museum halfway through the game takes some fun liberties with item placement, not to mention item validity. A riot at a police station with corrupt cops facing escaped criminals is impressively executed, even if it represents a kinetic peak that the game doesn’t quite replicate again until the last two or three stages. Nonetheless, what Streets of Rage 4 lacks in ambition, it makes up in attitude and style. It’s the best kind of retro throwback, reminding us how hard these kinds of games could hit.

The game was reviewed using a review code provided by Tinsley PR.

Score: 
 Developer: DotEmu, Lizardcube, Guard Crush Games  Publisher: Sega  Platform: PC  Release Date: April 30, 2020  ESRB: T  ESRB Descriptions: Cartoon Violence, Mild Language, Mild Suggestive Themes  Buy: Game

Justin Clark

Justin Clark is a gaming critic based out of Massachusetts. His writing has also appeared in Gamespot.

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