Streets of Rage (Genesis/Mega Drive)

In a city where crime has become so rampant even the police force can’t be trusted, a trio of ex-police officers seek to take down the crime syndicate responsible with only their hands, feet, and whatever they can find along the way. This is the incredibly simple set-up to Streets of Rage, a game whose energetic soundtrack and quick brawler action helped it establish one of the definitive series of the beat ’em up genre.

For people familiar with beat ’em up games, Streets of Rage should feel immediately familiar, the game taking place across a few levels where the player can only advance once they’ve cleared the screen of the current batch of enemies. There is, oddly, a timer that tries to ensure the player doesn’t dawdle too long in each confrontation, but its presence rarely seems to affect things unless the player really tries to avoid conflict. The three playable police characters are all capable martial artists, having access to strings of strikes that can be used to beat down whatever foes they face. Outside of the normal punches and kicks, the player can perform a variety of throws to deal heavy damage or move enemies about, but your basic combo will see more play as it is easy to execute and works on most of the common enemy types. There is one skill that is likely to emerge as a go-to though, that being the incredibly effective jump kick. In Streets of Rage, most enemies will approach you at a pretty consistent pace, the player often having time enough to get in the first strike, but foes come in crowds and since the player and their opposition can move up, down, forward, and back, there are many angles of approach to account for. While you can do a special input to attack enemies that are trying to sneak up on you from behind, the jump kick combines usefulness with ease of execution, the player able to bounce around the battlefield sending enemies falling back if the kick lands. The jump puts you out of reach of most enemies, and the kick will knock away foes as your character comes down, with the aerial mobility just the cherry on top of an already appetizing cake. It’s an effective and mostly reliable tool for making some room if you’re surrounded, but the game doesn’t completely let you get away with just using that move all the time. It’s not as quick as your rapid attacks and it can take some time to whittle down a foe’s life with just jump kicks, potentially allowing them to land a hit when your attack rhythm is disrupted. The game’s better counter to try and discourage the jump kick’s overuse though comes in the form of its enemy types.

Streets of Rage’s enemies are appropriately aggressive, giving the player room to maneuver but not being too passive. Most of the enemies you face will be the simple brawlers who just try to hit you when they can close in, but these basic grunts can come in packing special weapons like knives, lead pipes, and baseball bats that do more damage and augment the enemy’s range of attack. These weapons aren’t just for them though, the player able to knock it from their grasp and use it as a more effective basic attack until its durability has worn down. Other enemies like the women with whips and the martial artists will come at the player with a different fighting style, the whip women trying to press their range advantage and the martial artists leaping about and proving to be more agile foes. The martial artists are certainly part of the game’s efforts to discourage constant jump kicking as they can sometime dodge it and attack you from the side, but they’re still not incredibly effective, the player often able to do a reverse jump kick to deal with them before they can land their follow-up hit.

Bosses are where Streets of Rage can better force the player out of the jump kick comfort zone, some of them incredibly dangerous from the front and easily able to deal heavy damage to someone blindly jumping in to try their go-to tactic. Not every boss succeeds at this, but ones like the fire-breathing fat man and claw-wielding speedster both require different approaches. Bosses really only have one attack that the player has to learn and overcome though, so they’re not quite complex tests of your brawling skills, although the game sometimes throws regular enemies into the mix to make the fight a tiny bit harder. The player does have another fallback to see them through tough boss fights though, each life in Streets of Rage coming with one guaranteed use of a special attack. Calling in some cops who are on your side, they blast a bazooka that can clear a screen of basic enemies or deal heavy damage to a boss. You can earn more during a stage, but thanks to a decent distribution of lives and continues, a hard boss that keeps killing you can be overcome with repeated special attack uses as it is refreshed by your passing, although the final level removes your ability to use them and features rematches that will test if you actually learned how to fight these more powerful foes.

At the start of the game, you are asked to pick one of three characters for your crime-fighting adventure, those being Adam, Axel, and Blaze. You can expect them all to play somewhat similarly, each of them having the same basic attacks but with personal twists on them, but what truly defines them would be a set of three stats, each one of them worse at one than the other two. Adam is the slowest of the group, and even though he is powerful to make up for it, moving from screen to screen of bad guys with his slow walk can add some unfortunate sluggishness to the game. Axel’s failing is his jump stat, which doesn’t seem to truly limit his effectiveness all that much, and Blaze’s weakness is her lower power stat, although her speed makes up for it by letting her land more hits. A second player can take on the role of one of the characters as well for some cooperative beat em up action, but the game is thankfully not too hard without a friend.

There are a few shortcomings despite the decent difficulty level though. While health and extra lives are spaced well enough to be a relief to find but not so scarce you’re starving for them, the stages themselves feel like long stretches of repeated encounters with the same familiar faces. Some stages introduce new features like instant death pits, crushing hydraulic presses, and different kinds of destructible objects that might contain helpful pick-ups, the game falls back on using steadily stronger recolors of its two most generic enemies, sacrificing a baseline of interesting enemy variety but making the less common appearance of unique foes like the fire jugglers feel special. Broader distribution of those special enemy types would have certainly benefited the gameplay though, so it’s not a trade off that’s ultimately worth it. The actual fighting doesn’t suffer too much for it, but it does mean Streets of Rage can start losing steam when it’s being too conservative with the design of its enemy encounters.

THE VERDICT: Streets of Rage hits all the right marks when it comes to making an enjoyable beat ’em up, but it misses being exceptional by being too reserved in its battle design. It manages to keep the combat interesting even when you learn the effectiveness of the jump kick with packs of dangerous enemies and bosses who can shake up how you need to approach them, foes having just enough of an advantage to achieve a balance of being actual threats without overwhelming the player. The game could do with distributing its small amount of content more evenly across the experience, but the brawling doesn’t lose its luster even when you’re punching the same familiar faces a bit too often because of that difficulty balance.

And so, I give Streets of Rage for the Sega Genesis/Mega Drive…

A GOOD rating. A simple but strong start for a cornerstone beat ’em up series, Streets of Rage is essentially the prototypical brawler, having just what it needs to scratch the itch of beating up wave after wave of bad guys with your fists but not having much of a unique identity outside of things like visual design and its background music. The enemies that could have made the fighting more consistently varied need to come out more to help shore up the basic battles and bosses with a bit more up their sleeve than one repeated attack could help cap off levels to make a more memorable experience. Ensuring the game feels good to play definitely takes priority and Streets of Rage does not fail there, managing to be a good bit of action fun despite the simplicity.

As one of the big names in the beat ’em up genre, it’s not surprising Streets of Rage finds itself with a foot dangling over the genre’s most common pitfall of repetition. Streets of Rage gives you enough to deal with in regular fights with the occasional garnish of some uncommon enemy or unique environmental factor, it just could use greater prevalence of those ideas to make these streets more consistently exciting to explore.