So as a big SoR fan who has time with this game under his belt now, it's close to being good and that's frustrating. 6 points on how I feel:
1) Not casual friendly.
I got this game for my sister and nephew both because I'm a big series fan and wanted to grab it for them both since they've enjoyed beat em ups. The game simply is not beginner friendly or inviting at all. With me co-op they can manage but otherwise even on Easy they can hardly make it through the first level.
Then when they manage to, the game ranks them a F or whatever. Its not good design for a game like this at all. You should be rewarding people for doing great, not telling them they suck for anything less than greatness.
Both found the game incredibly uninviting which is disappointing for me.
This being said, it's not about being super simple then. Its about balance and having a starting character that simply feels like they pack a punch for someone doing the basic attacks out of the gate vs more complex combos. It's having a tutorial and assists more as well that don't feel like some sort of slight to the player for choosing.
They fucked that up. For a beat em up, you should start simple and then reward players for going above and beyond rather than start with some expectation of greatness and then rate people down against it. May sound like a tiny difference but its a big one in philosophy and how games come across and for a beat em up its very stupid.
2) The unlock system is way too much of a grind.
3) No vertical roll! (or defensive options to speak of)
For those that don't know, in SoR 3 they added a vertical roll which allows you to move a lot of space vertically very quickly and dodge enemy attacks. This game, for some dumb reason, decided to do away with that obvious improvement.
Come on man. I'd be cool if they instead opted for a dodge or block but nope. It sucks that you get no defensive options in this game. Tons of enemies have armor attacks and you're just supposed to manually move out of the way all the time? I can't believe developers thought that was satisfying. I've done it so I know its possible but it simply is not fun to manually dodge moves and play conservative.
If you don't add a block having no vertical roll is a travesty and makes this way worse than Streets of Rage Remake. The design seems confused in that it seems to be saying fuck defense (fine in theory) but instead does make you play quite defensively with all the bosses and enemies with armored attacks BUT gives you no cool options for that.
It simply makes you disregard offense and combos, the one part of the game that shines, to walk away from action and avoid enemy attacks with out any satisfying block or counter timing or dodge timing to satisfy someone playing. Awful design.
Side note: The Bloodborne style get your health back system for specials is not the worst part of the game but not good either. Nothing about the harmful nature of specials is good and should be done away with in favor of cool downs or perhaps a resource but they can't just do something friendly and easy you can build on, despite making a beat em up. SoR 3 already fixed this by having a cooldown and only if you used it outside the cooldown would it hurt (which makes sense but even that you can do away with IMO).
Again, bad design.
4) The main roster characters are, aside from the big bruiser, all incredibly weak hitting and the balance is really unsatisfying.
It's funny because this didn't hit me over the head playing my first time but when you unlock the SoR 1 characters, who have almost no moves but hit WAY harder, the game becomes so much more satisfying and easy to play. Combo systems are not that satisfying if you're hitting like a wimp all long and that's what this game does so badly and its funny the game shows its ass via the character system.
With the SoR 1 characters I have managed to get B or above ranks for the whole game on Hard, compared to struggling to get a B or above on Normal after the first 3-4 levels in the game with the main roster, which is pretty funny considering the SoR 1 characters eschew the whole combo heavy system and design of the new characters the game is highlighting. Instead just give me a character who can actually do some damage and use the SoR basics I've learned and I plow through the game. It's pretty damning.
I also thought Cherry was so OP at first, but as you go on you see yeah she can combo but is weak as hell. Not that you can't beat the game but it just is not satisfying at all to lighly slap enemies around, especially later in the game when enemies all have lots of health and its a boss rush.
I'm sure there are people so good at what this game is doing they can make the main characters shine but as someone who is good at action games and a SoR vet I haven't gelled with it yet or had a desire to learn more. Even if you did master the combo system with the weaker characters designed for it, you can't apply that strategy to bosses so much so what the hells the point?
The difficulty in general can be pretty all over the place boss wise. Max is by far the hardest boss for me personally and he occurs like 2/3 way through the game. Ms. and Mr. Y are both cakewalks, separate and together. The mech at the end is the easiest or second easiest boss in the whole game.
Side note: the reusing of bosses is worse here than previous SoR games, which usually did that to my memory as a boss rush gauntlet at the end vs throughout. Multiple stages just reuse bosses. And maybe you could say do something cool like a Nemesis style system if you are going to reuse bosses at least, you know trying to aim above the design of a 30 year old game, but nope.
5) The music is not up to snuff remotely and its sad to me they just said lets copy the SoR 1 and 2 sound when SoR 3 was already doing something new and moving on so long ago with a weird noise/electronic/industrial/Hip-hop type sound.
The real answer was to make something fresh sounding, maybe ride the wave of modern dance R&B with someone of a Kaytranda vibe or go Industrial with artists like Youth Code or Phase Fatale.
Seriously, go listen to the Streets of Rage 3 soundtrack. Poets I and II, Cycle I and II, Inga Rasen all sound so much more modern, interesting and fresh than this games soundtrack which is ridiculous.
6} The visual design and story stuff is just... fine. All the story and relation to the old games is studied but none of it is interesting or has any vision besides this kind of animated reimagining of the old style.
There are a few stages with cool moments but they usually are very short lived.
Cops v gang members for example gives you some great 3 way combat that I love where AI fight each other but only a focus for 1 stage in the whole game and I believe only shows up in one other stage briefly.
I always like a train level, even if its been done in every beat em up there is, but this one is incredibly samey and short in a way that's actually pretty crazy if you think about how phoned in it is in a 2020 beat em up to do it like that, adding nothing and having it be so brief it seems like someone at SEGA told them they had to have a train level (it even has a repeat boss).
The plane sequence later is really cool I think but also incredibly brief and doesn't cash in on it enough. Other moments are luckluster and many are direct copies of parts in the old game. Nothing new is as cool as the baseball field elevator, sorry folks. The coolest parts of any levels here still don't touch a game around 30 years old.
The art itself is pretty good quality and some of the reimagining is pretty cool to see but others feels just flat or like they did the same thing but tweaked it a bit in some arbitrary way to feel like they put their stamp on it. I dig Axel's beard for example, but why does he have a shirt tied around his waist the whole fucking game and why the hell was Axel wearing two button up shirts anyways? Why'd they make the biker enemy from the old games a lady now and never ride a motorcycle and now be the most annoying enemy in this game (move over big fat fire breathing guys)? Some dev knows the answers I guess but I expect a shrug.
If you look at the extras, there are design pictures for the art that I think show this at work. There are examples of them starting with designs more clean like classic SoR then slightly adding accessories to the characters which continue to make the design worse which is pretty funny to see lol. And there are designs for bosses and enemies straight from the old games that aren't in. So when Barbon shows up as a biker for some reason in that one stage, you can really imagine them basically choosing that at random like it felt playing as a fan, which sucks.
The game also seems to ignore SoR 3, besides having one cyborg character. To me, if you were making the sequel to SoR 3 you'd be going in more of a cyberpunk direction like that game obviously was but instead we got this drawn version of SoR 2 tweaked for the worse.
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In the end, it can be a fun game at times but its actually a huge disappointment to a SoR fan with how clearly they dropped the ball on things here, from design to balance. I had super low expectations but raised them just before and at release with how reviews came out, but the game is not deserving of that praise at all. Its not bad but its alright, which is worse because in ways they were on to things.
It's harder to get and certainly not legal, but SoR Remake blows this out of the water. If you are a fan and haven't played it, track it down. Basically throws a huge level editor in and gives you every SoR character plus extras with new moves and A VERTICAL ROLL. Its a SoR fan's dream.
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