About Streets Of Bloxwood Remastered:
Before we dive into this, I’d like to put out the disclaimer that I have never in my life played any Streets of Rage title before. What I did do, however is waste borderline shameful amounts of money on beat ’em up games on actual 90s arcade machines (Cadillacs & Dinosaurs for the win!), and that pretty much is the lens through which I look at these new additions to the genre. You might want to take what I say with that particular grain of salt. Also, I bought it with the DLC included outright, so the review is on that whole package. loved SOR2 + SOR3 Now i love SOR4 the most. I forgot how little content a game like this actually had when i was 12 and playing every day with a friend since it took forever to finally beat it on 2-3 lives. The expansion has really brought a ton more replay value, and now me and my GF are trying to beat our high scores/survival level every other day. absolutely loving it all Lizardcube have done the improbable: a totally new team not only managed to make a worthy followup to the classic Streets of Rage, they actually evolved the gameplay, arguably, so it’s the most engaging in the series. (The combo meter is a simple but brilliant mechanic.) And if that weren’t enough, Oliver Derivere, the game’s main composer (along with the incredibly talented Tee Lopes on the DLC’s soundtrack), did the impossible: stepping into the shoes of Yuzo Koshiro and Motohiro Kawashima and, with a lineup of guest composers, somehow filled those shoes. In both cases the smart move was to do what Rockstar Games did with Max Payne 3: pay proper tribute to what came before and yet do your own thing with the series. And that’s just what Lizardcube and Derivere have done incredibly well. Special mention should be made of the high quality of the Mr. X Nightmare DLC. I generally skip boss rush and endless battle modes in games (what’s the point?), but Lizardcube has made a game where the reward truly is is the gameplay itself, and so Survivial Mode becomes one of the game’s biggest attractions once you have bled the main campaign of strangeness. Lopes’s shockingly good soundtrack also serves as a driving force: you just want to hear his next track regardless of what it is. The 3 (?) new characters also fit in perfectly and are varied enough to be fun to play. Streets of Rage 4 is, for my money, one of the greatest achievements of game design in recent memory. I couldn’t be happier to be proven wrong that it was possible. And it look forward to being blown away by Lizardcube’s future projects.
