Streets of Rage 4

I'll be straight with you: I came into Streets of Rage 4 as a shooter guy who uses beat-em-ups to decompress between ranked sessions, and it grabbed me harder than I expected. The combat here is not the button-mash-til-you-win experience the genre's reputation suggests. Guard Crush Games layered in a juggle system where certain moves pop enemies airborne or slam them into walls for follow-up hits, and weapon bouncing off enemies lets you catch thrown pipes and bottles mid-air for immediate re-use. There is also a separate pickup button now, which sounds minor until you remember every time SOR2 made you eat an apple instead of throwing a punch. Special moves cost health but you can recover that health by landing normal attacks before taking damage again, which creates real decision-making pressure in the middle of a crowd. The roster splits cleanly between archetypes. Axel hits hard but has limited combo extension. Blaze trades raw power for longer combo strings and her aerial kick is a genuine combo tool with dodge utility baked in. Floyd is the slow grappler with brutal throw damage. Cherry is the speed character who wants to stay mobile and weaponize her guitar. Each of the new four characters plays differently enough that replays with different picks genuinely change how you approach the 12 stages. On top of that, retro characters from the original trilogy unlock as your lifetime score climbs, and they play exactly as they did in the '90s, pixel art and all, which is either charming or visually jarring depending on your tolerance for that kind of nostalgia bait. Here is where I have to be honest about the online situation, because it matters. The netcode uses delay-based P2P, not rollback. Online co-op caps at 2 players natively, and community feedback has been consistent: input lag is noticeable even on good connections, and cross-region sessions can be genuinely rough. If you are buying this to run sessions with a friend across the country, temper expectations or route through Steam Remote Play as a workaround. Local co-op up to 4 players is a completely different story, tight and responsive, and that is where the game actually shines. The 84 Metacritic score reflects the offline experience, not the online one. The presentation holds up well. Hand-drawn art from Lizardcube gives Wood Oak City a comic-book energy that aged better than pixel remakes usually do. The soundtrack has contributions from Yuzo Koshiro and you can toggle between the new score and the retro tracks from SOR1 and SOR2, both of which work. Runs at a locked 60fps on PC with low hardware requirements, so your rig is fine. The main story takes 3 to 5 hours depending on difficulty, and Arcade Mode strips you down to a single credit for the kind of punishment fans of the original games actually want. Boss Rush and a Training mode round out the modes. It is short by modern standards, but the score-chase loop and multiple playable characters give replay legs to anyone who cares about that. Bottom line: this is a local co-op game first, a solo score-chaser second, and an online co-op game a distant third. If you have a couch setup and one other person willing to pick up a controller, it punches well above most things in the genre. If online multiplayer is the whole point, the netcode situation is a real problem and you should know that going in. Fred, Scout Team