Cleaning up the streets
Written: Sep 24 '04
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Gameplay,Innovative desperation move, nice enemies,great music
Cons: sprites a little small, Streets of Rage 2 improves on it in most ways
The Bottom Line: SOR is a great game that all Sega owners/Beat 'em up fans should look into. While the sequel is much better, this is still a great game
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| flash-hammer's Full Review: Streets of Rage for Sega Genesis |
One of the most famous Megadrive/Genesis titles, Streets of Rage was one third of the immortal Mega Games 2 compilation that came with many a Sega during the console's heyday. As much as a response to Capcom's Final Fight as anything else, Streets of Rage is a Beat 'em Up in the same vein as Capcom's legendary scrapper and Tradewest's Double Dragon.
You choose one of three characters, all with varying strengths and weaknesses, and fight your way through 8 stages worth of thugs, ending each stage with a showdown with a boss character. Naturally the game included a 2-Player Co-Op mode, which allowed you to team up with a friend/sibling to take down the evildoers of your city.
The story of the game is simple, a crime syndicate headed up by the mysterious Mr.X has taken control of your city. Most of the cops have been bought off, but a select few, lead by Axel, Adam and Blaze have had enough, and set out to take down the crime syndicate themselves.
One thing about the game that separated it from other Beat 'em Ups, was the characters desperation move. In most games like this, a desperation move is usually an attack that drains some of your own energy, but can hit several enemies at once, clearing the area around you. But not in Streets of Rage, oh no, here you call on one of the few remaining straight cops, who comes arrives in a car and fires a bazooka that will do severe damage to all enemies on screen. You can only perform this once per stage unless you pick up the correct item.
The basic gameplay of the game is superb. There are no collision detection problems, and the game has varied stages and enemies so you never grow bored. You can also pick up several weapons such as knives, bats and bottles to help dish out damage. Each character can attack in a few ways, from the air, in a grapple and straightforward attacking. While the game isn't anything spectacularly original, it is built around a good engine, and outplays the majority of Beat 'em Ups on the simple grounds of how fun it is. Single player is amusing, but 2-Player is where it is really at. There is nothing more fun than teaming up with someone to take down the enemy, with more often than not strategies being thrown out of the window at least three minutes into play as you scream at each other to cover you and scold for hitting each other by accident.
Graphically, the game may well have aged a bit, but it still looks good. The sprites of the characters are well animated, if a little on the small side, and the stages are incredibly detailed. Look for the skyline out of the window of the boat, that was pretty damn spectacular for an early 90s game.
Like I say, the sprites are a little on the small side, especially in comparison with the sequel, but the fact that they are well animated and pretty detailed for their size makes up for this quite a bit.
The design of a lot of the characters is also top notch, but some are just weird. We have fat blokes who breath fire, Freddy Krueger wannabes, WWF wrestlers and the sexy (well at the time) femme fatale twins (even if they were palette swapped Blaze). But on the strange note there are clowns juggling axes that look like Sting (from the Police).
The characters you can play are pretty standard, blonde muscleman, black martial artist and scantily clad female, but they have a bit of simplistic charm to them.
The sound in the game, while primitive sounding now, was cutting edge at the time, and the game still contains some excellent tunes by Sega's game-music god Yuzo Koshiro, also responisble for the music in Streets of Rage 2 and The Revenge of Shinobi. A lot of the tunes are pretty memorable and catchy, and there wasn't any music that I felt could be classed anywhere near bad.
The sound effects are decent, if nothing spectacular, the groans and screams of those defeated sound decent, and you have to love the bottle smashing sound.
The controls are simple and only require the regular 3-Button pad, A is Desperation Call in, B is attack and C is jump. You can grapple by walking very close to an enemy, and access more attacks from there. Pressing B several times in a row will cause your character to perform a combo attack.
You can't complain with controls that simple, and there are no response complaints, so on the whole, the game's controls are a success.
On the whole, the game is one of the most generally successful Beat 'em Ups I have ever played. And most of the few faults I have with the game come from playing and comparing this to the sequel, which is the genre defined, so they aren't exactly huge flaws.
Sure the sprites are small and there aren't as many weapons on offer, but on the whole, Streets of Rage, especially on 2-Player, is generally one of the most enjoyable experiences I have ever had in gaming.
There is something brilliantly gritty about the game, the stages are dark and nasty, the weapons aren't flashy, to my knowledge, this was the first game which actually allowed you to bottle someone (the bottle even smashes and can be used to stab!) and thats a pretty realistic prospect in a streetfight.
But even though realism isn't what the game is going for, it's touches like this that set it apart from Double Dragon's finding Nunchuka lying on the street.
Also, who could forget the last battle?, its one of the most memorable last battles ever, in part because of the intro. Mr.X actually asks if you would like to join his syndicate! and you have the option. Given choosing to join resets the game, but if you are on 2 player and one chooses yes and the other no, you have to scrap with each other.
When you finally do get to X, he pulls out a Tommy Gun and tries to turn it into a shootout! its stuff like this that makes these games legendary.
To be honest, I think 4 Stars will do the game, if it's sequel wasn't so marvelous, the game could easily have scored 5, but SOR2 is a marked improvement, and going back to playing this after becoming accustommed to 2 is pretty tough. But the game still has enough going for it in terms of gameplay to warrant an above average score.
If you like Beat 'em Ups, Streets of Rage comes highly recommended, while the second game is better, it is probably wiser to start at the beggining, because this is a highly enjoyable game, and it's probably best played before the second game.
Streets of Rage is a solid and extremely fun game with good music, cool weapons, nice stages and is generally only let down by the fact that it's sprites are a bit small, and it has a near perfect sequel. If you own a Megadrive/Genesis, chances are you own this, if you don't, then you should look into it. Its a highly enjoyable game, especially if you have a friend willing to help clean up the streets.
Recommended:
Yes
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flash-hammer
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