Streets of Rage II

"When you have beat this game on Mania, your life will never be the same again."

Streets of Rage was Sega's game that turned out to not only be able to rival the SNES beat em ups, but also turned out to be even better than most of them. Since the game was such a huge success, Sega decided to give the game a sequel that could live up to the name. Today Streets of Rage 2 is by many considered to be one of the absolute best games Sega has ever made. It's hard to understand if you haven't played this game how great a game actually can be.

The game takes place in the same unknown city as the first game. It's one year after Axel, Blaze and Adam crushed Mr X's crime empire. After having a nice party night, Axel and Blaze finds Adam's house to be completely destroyed and they find a picture of Adam chained into a wall. It turns out that Mr X is back in the city, and this time he wants revenge on the three prevented his plans. Axel and Blaze must once again battle through the Streets of Rage to get to Mr X's headquarter and save their friend. However they will get help from two others in this game. Adam's younger brother Sammy "Skate" Hunter and Axel's best friend Max Thunder.

In the first Streets of Rage each character was good in two things and bad in another thing. The status is a little more complicated in Streets of Rage 2. Each character has a total of 10 status points which have been split in 5 different categories: Power (How much damage they can make), Technique ( How good techniques they have), Speed (How fast they moves), Jump (how good jump attacks they have) and finally Stamina (How much damage a character can take.)

Another thing that has replaced the Back Up Calls are the special moves. Each character has one "swing attack" which is great to use if your character is surrounded by enemies, but it drains a little life if it hits anyone. There are also the Special Move, which usually is a strong front attack move. This takes a little damage on your character no matter if you hit any enemy or not. Finally there's the Rush Move, which never takes any damage on your character and is a great move to not only do damage but also to escape from the enemies.

The new character Max Thunder is the typical ultra big and strong dude, many fans likes to compare him with Mike Haggar from Final Fight. Max is the by far most powerful character, however he's also by far the slowest of the four. Max is in his best when he either has a pipe to fight with or when can get so close enough to grab his enemies. Then he can either crush their heads which takes a lot of time but do a lot of damage, or he can jump with the enemies and then throw them (Which is the strongest attack in this game if Max grabs the enemies from behind).

Axel is somewhat different from the previous Streets of Rage game. He has ok stats in everything except Jump where he's horrible and Technique where he is the master. This means while Axel isn't as powerful as Max, some of his techniques, can do even more damage. One attack that almost never manages to do much damage but can do a lot if he hits an enemy with every punch. His rush move is also one of the absolute best moves, which makes him one of the best characters in any difficulty.

Blaze on the other hand isn't that much different from the character she was in the first Streets of Rage. However Blaze has 2 points in every status, which makes her the all round character in this game. She doesn't have many advantages of Axel, but one thing is that she has the best jump attacks in this game, which can both be used to keep the distance from the enemies and to get closer to an enemy. Just like Axel, Blaze special move and rush move can do a lot of damage, however almost everyone consider Axel to be the better character of the two.

Finally there's the new character Skate. He's just about everything that Max isn't. His attacks doesn't do as much damage but he's much faster. Skate is also the only character in this game who can run, since he has a pair of skates on his feet. His range is also by far the worst in the game, and he can't take as many hits as the other characters. If you want the game to be really difficult or just want a different experience, then Skate is your character.

Just like in the original Streets of Rage, this game is a scrolling beat em up game. On each stage you meet a lot of enemies which must be killed in order to advance on the stage. There are also a few different of weapons that you can pick up and use to fight your enemies. The weapons usually is stronger than your regular fists, but on the other hand every character (except maybe Max since he's already so slow) takes more time to attack with a weapon than with the fists, and it's not possible to do any combos with the weapons.

The four hit system hasn't changed in this game. You first attack with two regular jabs when you are attacking an enemy, then your character does another move and then a third move which knocks the enemy down. The last move can be done even without doing the previous ones if you hold down the attack button for awhile and then release the button.

It's also possible to do a back attack, if you press the attack button and the jump button at the same time. You do the rush move by quickly pressing forward two times and then the attack button. You do the swing attack by pressing just the special button and then the special move if you press forward and the special button.

There's also a duel mode if you want to play against a friend instead of with a friend. While this mode is nothing compared to real dueling game, Sega have been nice enough to give us many different stages to play in. There are different weapons to pick up in different stages, so it's important that you plan your strategy against your friend really well. But as I said before this game is more fun if you play it with your friend instead.

And when you are talking about Streets of Rage, it's impossible to not mention the soundtrack of the games, and personally I would say that Streets of Rage 2 is the best in the series when it comes to the music as well. Every music track is easy to remember, and it's hard not to picture the place you hear it if you listen to it on the sound test screen or on your computer or what ever you like to use to play video game music.

The last thing that makes Streets of Rage 2 is the difficulty. It's very easy on the easiest difficulties but the game gets much harder on each difficulty. When you beat the game on Very Hard you will get a cheat that allows you to play the game on the Mania difficulty. It took me and my brother 10 months of a daily try to beat the game on that difficulty, and it's impossible for me to describe the feeling when we finally beat it. But even if we played this game every day for almost 10 months, we still didn't get tired of playing it. And bought this game after the other two Streets of Rage games.

It's no brainier why the beat em up genre almost died during the middle 90's. First of all Street Fighter 2 had been released and everyone now wanted to battle their friends instead of working together, and then Streets of Rage 2 had been made, the perfect beat em up. No Double Dragon, Golden Axe, Final Fight, Turtles or even Streets of Rage 3 would be able to top this masterpiece. If only every sequel was as great as Streets of Rage 2, what a perfect world we would live in then.

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 06/18/07