Streets of Rage 2 - Sega Megadrive

Review comments

Streets of Rage 2 box art After Axel Stone, Blaze Fielding and Adam Hunter destroyed the evil Syndicate leader, Mr. X, the city became a peaceful place to live, and each one of them followed their own paths. One year later, after their reunion, Adam's brother Sammy returned from school to find their apartment in a mess, and Adam nowhere to be seen, and after calling his two friends, one of them notices a photo of Adam chained to a wall, next to someone they knew very well - Mr. X, who returned to turn the peaceful city once again into a war zone. Now, Axel, Blaze, Sammy, and Axel's good friend Max, a pro wrestler, must head out to stop Mr. X once again...hopefully for good...

Streets of Rage 2 is a major improvement over the previous title. Changes in both graphics (characters now are bigger, better detailed and with more animation frames and scenarios are less grainy) and gameplay (the rocket move was replaced by a special move that doubles in offense and defense along several new moves), along other new features such as life bars (and names) for all enemies and the radically different new characters make the game one of the definitive titles of Sega's 16-bit console.

Retrospective comments

If you haven't yet played Streets of Rage II then you are in for a treat. Simply put this is probably the best scrolling beat-em-up available on any console. Yes it is that good!

Sega didn't do just a lazy update of the original - this sequel got the full treatment. So what's new? First two new characters in the shape of cumbersome muscleman Max Thunder and Adam's little bro Eddie AKA 'Skate' (No Adam though). The inclusion of these new characters really helps to balance the gameplay out. Each character plays quite differently so it adds more variety to the game than the prequel. Gone is the silly special weapon of a police car firing missles at the bad guys upon request (which served to break the gameplay with a 5 second cutscene). To replace this new 'special' moves have been included which can help get the player out of a tricky situation. Double tapping the D-pad in the direction you a produces a special move such as Axel's uppercut, with a press of the special weapon button you can produce two powerful energy sapping moves depending if you press forwards or not.

The fighting mechanics are improved greatly with more scope for combos and tag team shenanigans. The baddies are tougher than ever with crazed motorcyclists, sword wielding ninjas and Blanka style beasts for you to dispatch into next week.

The music is as awesome as ever with the genius of Yuzo Koshiro writing the score. There's a techno vibe which works so well with this type of game. The sound effects are great too. You will have no complaints in the visuals department either, the animation is lovely and smooth, no slowdown even with 10 enemies or more are on the screen at once, the character sprites and big, bold and colourful and the backgrounds are some of the more detailed you will see on the Megadrive.

For a game which was released in 1992 this game feels as if it has not aged at all. It is really the definitive 2 player scrolling beat-em-up and deserves to be in every gamers' collection.