Review: STREETS OF RAGE 4 is Awesome

Streets of Rage is a popular beat-em-up video game franchise. The latest entry, Streets of Rage 4, recently dropped on Nintendo Switch, PC, PS4, and Xbox One from developers DotEmu, Lizardcube, and Guard Crush Games. DotEmu was kind enough to provide me a copy on PC and it’s been a blast.

Update: After a lot more troubleshooting, and after many accounts from other players of having no problems, I was eventually able to get the controllers to work 100%. This has also resulted in a score bump from 8-9.

Streets of Rage 4 features beautiful art and colorful hand-drawn characters for you to clean up the streets of Wood Oak City. The game is your classic beat-em-up, but be careful since your stronger attacks will deplete your health. One cool feature of the game is that you can go and turn it into a simple fighting game in the Battle mode. You and your opponent simply choose your favorite character and fight each other. This is a cool way to break up the monotony of defeating nameless bad guys.

The music and sounds are also spot on. There’s really not much to complain about for the game. If you enjoy a beat-em-up, you’ll love Streets of Rage 4. You can play the game by yourself, with 3 of your friends offline on the same machine, or online with 1 of your friends or a stranger. There’s a lot of ways to play and it just adds to the fun.

With all that praise though, there is one aspect of the game that has given me too much grief to not mention. The PC version through Steam supports controllers, but something has gone wack. I plugged in my two USB controllers which work for all my other games and yet Streets of Rage 4 has all the problems with them. Keep in mind, the problem is not that the controller isn’t seen, it’s that it’s always read incorrectly. If I press A, the game will randomly choose to act as if I had pressed A or B. Same with X and Y. If I was lucky enough to get in the game, this led to an inability to do certain tasks like normal attacks or pick items up. In addition, when going to select a character, it skips around so I can only select the first or third character. Oh, and when I press A to select my character, it instead decides to add another player, even if I don’t have another controller plugged in. This is a fairly large problem as I can’t find a way to support multiplayer with a keyboard and so I was unable to test out local multiplayer. This should be something fairly easy to fix though, so I’m hopeful that if we give it some time, it’ll work like a charm.

A more minor complaint would be that I wish there was something that told you of any differences between the characters. I felt like Floyd dealt more damage and wasn’t as agile while Cherry seemed quicker. Maybe I just imagined that?

If you don’t mind using a keyboard and you don’t mind not accessing the local multiplayer options on PC, Streets of Rage 4 is a great game. It has everything you could want from a beat-em-up title and even sneaks in an FPS meter that you can toggle to make sure you hit that sweet 60 fps.