Street Fighter IV

"Like getting a root canal done over and over and over"

First off, let me say that my experience with Street Fighter has a severe gap between having Streetfighter II Turbo on the SNES, and buying this game after reading favourable reviews everywhere. This isn't a review for long standing Street Fighter fans, but for people like myself who are more casual fight fans.

Street Fighter four is a great, fun game to play around the TV with friends of an equal skill ability. Everyone can pick up the basics pretty quick, and anyone of a certain age will have the combinations for basic fireballs imprinted somewhere in their very DNA. The old characters are a great nostalgia trip and you can have some good times.

Online is a mixed bag. For every well fought battle you'll have, you'll come up against an ungodly warmonger or a cheap button masher, take an absolute pounding, and you'll be immensely frustrated. While this has a lot to do with my own actual ability to play the game, Street Fighter four itself doesn't help matters. The learning curve is pretty much non existent in this game, and couple that with an x box controller that seemingly cant tell up from down and left, and button commands that would befuddle the nimble fingers of a concert pianist, and you'll be biting holes in your cheeks out of impotent rage.

And it gets worse, much worse. Single player is so excrutiatingly difficult to play that you'll be kicking your x box somewhere in the direction of the center of the universe most rounds. While I'm all for challenging video games, they also have to have an element of fun to them. Playing against the computer is absolutely joyless because Capcom saw fit to program the CPU fighters to emulate the skills of the most frustrating eight year old school yard bully. The process of most matches sees the CPU spamming the same move over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over, hitting a seemingly unavoidable ultra / super combo, then suddenly your x box shatters into a billion atoms as you drive your forehead through it. Mark my words, Street Fighter four will be responsible for more broken consoles than all the Red Rings of Death in the world. I happened to count Balrog hitting the same spinning punch seven times in a row. The only way I could defeat him was by crouching and tapping light kick continously. Essentialy, Capcom had reduced me to the level of a NASA chimp blindly prodding a button without a clue why, in the hope of a rewarding banana (or, in this case, a cheap win just to progress to the next round.) I'm sure that given time you could be expected to pick up reasonable skill levels in this game, but what incentive is there to practice when the game is JUST NO FUN?

The new characters are also not particularly well designed. By the time El Fuerte has spun you around for the 400th time you'll be spitting bilious rage at your TV so much it will begin to disintegrate. Crimson Viper has a move where she can simply hit the floor and half your energy bar disappears. Rufus looks ridiculous. Abel is so boring that you could market him as a cure for insomnia.

And the new boss, Seth, looks like a novelty ice cube. He is also, surprise, surprise, utterly cheap and ridiculous. Street Fighter may have had it's share of unrealistic characters (Dhalsim, Blanka...) but this one takes the cake. Ooh, a blue man, with a ying yang in his stomach, ooh, and they've stacked him with every annoying move in the game, wow.

Please Capcom, next time just save me thirty five quid and come to my house, blow the door off it's hinges, shoot my loved ones, set the place on fire, kick me in the teeth and pull off my eyelids with rusty pliers and stab a letter opener into my heart. It will be horrible but at least I wont have to hear that stupid announcer.

The graphics and sound are amazing, there is no doubt, even the theme song that should be sub- N*SYNC is actually pretty catchy.

In conclusion, fans of the series who have some sort of biological adaption that lets them actually pull off the combos will love it. Fans of Street Fighter two will have fun playing with friends, and probably over X box live. If you are the sort of person who can put up with paralysing anger and don't mind replacing your x box every few days then you'll also not mind the single player. For someone like myself, who was looking for a fun fighter and who plays games for enjoyment rather than some sort of masochistic self torture thrill, you may want to give serious thought to how much you are going to get out of it.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 03/03/09

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