Street Fighter IV Review

IT'S FINALLY HERE!

I'll start this review by saying that i have not played a Street Fighter game since SFII on Mega Drive. This was back in the days when Street Fighter was still fairly new, and everyone was still learning all the moves and combos. My friends and i would play against each other, and "Just stand still, i wanna try something" was a fairly new phrase.
I must admit that i was also not very good at it.
Now, Street Fighter 4 is here and it is still damn hard, but still DAMN AWESOME!

This game is just as challenging and unforgiving as ever. I started playing it on Easy (as i said, i sucked back in the day), and i STILL got my ass handed to me multiple times against the AI. Easy isn't the easiest difficulty though, there are still two difficulties below easy, so i was still quite pleased that i at least made it to the final battle, after many loses and character changes of course.

It does at least try to help newbs by having a challenge mode, where you can do the trial challenges. These essentially allow you to go in against a dummy opponent and gives you the task of pulling off the different combos and moves for each character. As you go higher in the challenges you get harder combos to pull off. They can get quite ridiculously challenging, but they at least show you all the possible moves for each character.

Then you have the main Arcade mode...it's Street Fighter....do i really need to explain what you do here. You fight and lose a lot, 'nuff said.

I will talk about the Graphics though. HOOOOOLY SHIIIT!, this game looks like a god damn painting. This is definitely Street Fighter in Art Direction, but it's also a Next-Gen game. More than the Art Style though, the animation is very "Street Fighter". The expressions on the Characters faces are amazing. If you back your character up to block moves, you'll see them with a frightened look on their face. If your kickin ass, you'll see they're quite pleased to do so. If you're getting YOU'RE ass kicked, the characters eyes will bulge from their heads in pain. It's truly amazing that they got the exact expressions from the old hand-drawn games into these new Polygonal versions, it's quite an achievement.

If you have no friends to play against this time around, you can now head online and play aainst a real person over the interwebs. I haven't been able to try online yet unfortunately, but i'll let you know how it is, when i do.


This game is Street Fighter, from the look, to the speed of movement, to the combos and special moves, it's all here, only updated to be the most amazing fighting game i've ever had the pleasure of playing. Fighting games aren't as popular a genre as they used to be, but hopefully this re-birth of Street Fighter will inspire other companies to update their franchises (Get rid of the DCU and give us a brand new violent gory Mortal Kombat please Midway). I love the thought that there is gonna be some kids playing this game, just like me and my friends did with SFII, and "Just stand still, i wanna try something" will be re-born.

5 Stars *****