Game #1099: Streets of Rage 4 Anniversary Edition

Back 4 DLC.

As someone that wants everything physical, Streets of Rage 4: Anniversary Edition was a no-brainer since it includes the recently released DLC. I already talked about the game itself, so I'll focus on what's new.

 First of all, new SKU, so if you owned the original game your savefile is useless. Thankfully the game is a blast, so I quickly beat the game with all three new characters: Shiva, Estel and Max. Firstly, I took Shiva on Easy, to get reacquainted with how the game played. Well, I wound up loving Shiva, he is very combo-focused, and is super speedy, with the only con of being unable to wield weapons. Then I went on Normal with Max, I didn't like him very much, he is focused on grabs. Then I took Estele on hard, and she wasn't as slow as Max, but didn't have the comboability Shiva had, making her a more balanced character. She was decent. There's a fourth hidden character, Roo, but he is using his pixelated and out-of-place SoR 3 sprite, so I didn't care about him.

 Characters are the most interesting additions, but not the only additions. There's a new Survival Mode that pits you against endless waves of enemies, and on every new wave you can pick a buff between two options. Like adding elemental effects to some of your attacks, increasing your stats, an extra jump, etc. While there are no new enemies(Bah, there are a few new palette swaps in this mode), there are new backgrounds and weapons made exclusively for this mode, which is pretty neat. The mode itself was pretty darn fun, and I spent more time than I had thought in it. But even better, you can unlock alternate special moves for your characters(Double tap forward + Y, X, X+Forward, Aerial X). All characters get an alternate set of special moves, which you can mix and match. To be fair, there are no new animations, they simply repurposed other animations to get new attacks out of them, but hey, it adds variety to the game and lets you customize your characters a bit. Heck, there are 3 new alternate colors for the SoR 4 characters.

 There's a new free-training mode in which you can toy around with various settings or spawn any combination of enemies, provided you defeated them in Survival mode, which is a quirky new addition to the game.

 I think... I think these new additions made Streets of Rage 4 a must-have for any beat'em up lover. I think the game got a bit rebalanced, because it felt more fair to play than when I did the last time around. Adding to this, the new character Shiva was right up my alley, and I had so much fun playing as him that it hooked me harder than the previous release did, to the point that I've already played this version a little more than I did the first release. And the Survival mode... I thought I'd give it a try and quickly forget about it, but it turns out I kept replaying it because it was so much fun, heck, I even tried it with the old characters and had a blast too. All in all, I'd say this re-release turned SoR 4 into a new favorite of mine.

 9.0