Review

Street Fighter IV Review

by Absolute Steve

The gameplay is solid, just like any other Streetfighter game. You'll get to play with your old favourites such as Ryu, Ken, and M. Bison, but there are also new characters that have been added into the mix such as El Fuerte. Each character plays uniquely as you'd expect of a fighting game of this calibre. The game has found a way to make things a lot harder for button bashers – and I admit that I've often used this strategy before, which almost always seems to give good results. All the better for people who actually try to use combos, because the game seems to give more time to pull off combos than in the rest of the series.

That's a great thing, and as you spend more time with the game you'll appreciate every character more and more. It looks like the characters are of equal balanced strength and speed in the end; some are stronger and slower, others weaker and faster, but it all works out in the end when you place two fighters of the opposite ends against each other. Find your favourite fighter by playing with all of them and show your friends who's boss. The leaderboard function will add tons of replay value with the online possibilities to play VS others. Add loads of nifty features such as the ability to switch between JP and English voices in battle and you're pretty much guaranteed to please everyone.

Graphics

The graphics look goofily cartoony in a fun way, and this may require some time to get used to. Don't expect realistic graphics, because Streetfighter just isn't meant to look like that. Having said that, after playing this for a few hours the graphics already looked perfect and every character has been worked out to great 3D models with loads of detail.

The menus look smooth and are intuitive, there's nothing wrong there. However, you might find a small point to complain about. Although you might believe so, not quite everyone has a large HD TV at their home. If you're playing on a regular TV then you may find the text in the combo screens difficult to read, even if your TV is large, and there's not really a way around this. Of course, this will only apply to a small group of people.

Story

Each character has their own story. This is told through short anime movies at beginning and end of the game. They look beautiful for as long they last, because they're all rather short, usually under one minute. Granted this makes for a fairly long running time if you add up all characters, but it feels a little short regardless of that.

As for the stories themselves, I won't spoil any endings for you. Check out some videos with anime movies in them for various characters.

Soundtrack

With pumping tracks that sound like popularized j-pop I can only imagine how badly Capcom wanted to make this game successful. Although there are many catchy tunes in the game as a whole, some of them will get particularly boring if you spend hours of playing. As for sound effects, they're fine as well, but characters always say the same thing at the start of a battle. This could've easily been made into 3 different lines instead of just one.

Overall

Streetfighter IV is greater than it's sum of parts and it plays really nice. Old-school fans will love the conversion to 3D while newcomers will love how they're going to be able to pull off awesome combo's within just days of training. The game has enough potential and the hype will certainly make this title a success.

Gouken Akuma Artistic Trailer

More Street Fighter 4 GamePlay Videos here

More Street Fighter 4 Screenshots here