Justin Leigh

With Streets of Rage 2 being one of my favourite games of all time, I went into this game trying to suppress my high hopes and be objective about it. Any anxiety I had about it living up to standards set by the previous SOR games was swept aside within the first couple of levels. This game is a joy to play. The characters feel weighty and the combat packs a punch (unlike Double Dragon Neon); also, there is enough variety between characters to make them all worth playing the game through with. It feels familiar, but there are also small tweaks to the fighting that only add to the enjoyment, without breaking an already winning formula. Throw in a great score by Yuzo Koshiro and lovingly hand-drawn characters and backgrounds and you have a 2D beat-em-up that not only hits all the nostalgia buttons from the early 90's, but moves the genre forward into the current day.