Street Fighter IV

"Capcom create a game which fails to capture the greatness of SF2."

After Die Hard fans were stuck buying SF2 over and over again with minor changes, it may be a welcome change that Capcom decided to make a new addition in the Street Fighter series. After a long wait the game is finally out. Is it the ultimate fighter people were expecting, or did it fail to meet expectations?

~Visuals~

What many people think, and I agree, is that it was a good decision staying in the realm of 2 dimensions. The graphics are highly polished with great effects and a nice cartoony look. Make of it what you will, but it has nice anime/manga visuals, and the frame rate is steady, excluding a few drops now and then. While the X Box version has less jaggies that the PS3, no one outside of GameFAQs will really care, and for the bonus of the PS3 D Pad, it's a fair trade. It's pretty clean and crisp, and you won't get tired looking at the graphics with the detailed and excellent looking character models.

~Gameplay~

The game features your standard "kick someones butt untill they fall over and stay down" gameplay, with a few (minor or major is your choice) flaws. First of all, the controls feel incredibly clunky, and playing with the 360's d pad is torture, it's pretty much one big circle button. The gameplay feels incredibly slow and heavy, too much for it to feature the charm that SFII has, and it has no speed. There's no help for newcomers except a few buttons with different colours which don't relate to the controller at all. To me, this ruined the game and after a couple of hours I couldn't play without cursing at the core gameplay.

~Sound~

The game features an incredible soundtrack, bar 1 certain menu theme, which starts off kickass but turns into a song which will be stuck in your head for all the wrong reasons. It totally butchered an awesome beat, but enough dwelling on awful music. Overall, the soundtrack is awesome with several stellar tracks which suit the levels perfectly. The music is basically the high point of this game just because the rest of it beats that bad menu theme.

~Overall~

Sure, the game has stellar graphics and music, but it's missing out on stardom with clunky controls, heavy and slow gameplay and basically the help for newcomers, or shall I say lack of?

Street Fighter IV is a decent game, but it certainly doesn't capture the essence of Street Fighter II nor redefine the genre.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 02/24/09

Game Release: Street Fighter IV (EU, 02/20/09)