Game review: Street Fighter IV

One of the longest running series of fighting games it the Street Fighter series. It all started back on the NES with Street Fighter 2010. This game didn't do to well and the series gained popularity with Street Fighter II on SNES. It became one of the biggest selling fighting games of all times and was one of the biggest selling games on the system.

Since then there have been many different versions of the game including the Alpha and Zero series as well as crossovers with Marvel and SNK. But when Street Fighter III came out fans were disappointed. The move system was too much of a change and people preferred the other games much better. So Capcom has decided to do another true sequel with Street Fighter IV. This is the first original Street Fighter game to appear on next-gen consoles and it certainly looks the part. The graphic style of this game is pretty different from anything you see out there. Everything has a cell shaded look but the characters are modeled in 3D. The background stages are also very detailed with pretty much all of them having something moving around in the background. From a parking lot with people and cars jumping around to a military base with a cargo plane being towed in the background. Also in traditional Street Fighter fashion some of the stages even have destrucible objects.

All of the classic Street Fighter characters are in the game. Such as Ken, Ryu, Blanka, M. Bison, Vega, Balrog, Chun-Li and Zangief. There are also a few returning from the Alpha series with Cammy and Akuma. Along with those there are some new characters El Fuerte, Rufus and Crimson Viper. Thankfully these characters feel pretty well at home in the Street Fighter universe.

Now the overall controls haven't changed that much. For Ryu and Ken it is the standard quarter-circle move to pull off a fireball. Then for Guile it is holding back for a few seconds and moving forward to do a Sonic Boom. All the other characters follow a very similar patter so if you know the standard moves you can pull of most of the special moves. What has been added are the Super and Ultra combos. There are two meters on the bottom of the screen. Your Super meter fills up when you do damage to your opponent and the Ultra meter fills up when you take damage. When this is full you can do a super move which usually involves something like two quarter-circles or two back and forth motions to pull off and the Ultra combo adds a few more button presses. There are also the Focus attacks which allow you to counter someone else's move, but I was never able to pull these off.

Probably my biggest complaint about this game is the controls. I got decent at Street Fighter II on the SNES and that controller worked well for pulling off the special moves, however the Xbox 360 controller does not. For me I could not do Ryu's fireball on the d-pad but when I switched to the analog stick it worked a lot better. But the analog stick hurt my movement so I had to keep going back and forth which made it harder to beat my opponents.

Then there is the difficulty. The Street Fighter games have been known for being hard and this one lives up to the name. I first played the game on Medium difficulty and found myself getting beaten badly so I dropped it to Easy and had the same problem. I then dropped it to very easy and for the most part I was doing good. Until I came across Zangief. He was so incredibly cheap it took me nearly 20 minutes to beat him with Chun-Li. Every time you get close to him he grabs you and does his spinning piledriver. But if you want to talk about cheap you have to talk about the game's final boss Seth. Seth is a robot and he can do other character's moves like stretching his arms like Dhalsim, throwing Sonic Booms, the Dragon Punch, and Zangief's spinning piledriver among others. The first round when you fight him he is pretty easy but then the second round his difficulty spikes. He hits you with moves out of nowhere and will slam you with huge combos that drain your life. I struggled to get past him even on very easy and this made the game pretty frustrating at times.

One thing the game does have is online multiplayer. These games are really meant to be played with friends. I remember the feeling as a kid of playing my friends at Street Fighter II and kicking their butts. But at this point so many people have played the game that you are bound to run across people that can pull off every move with 100% accuracy. So if you find yourself struggling against the AI then do not play online unless you want to embarrass yourself.

So the rest of the game consists of the arcade mode and the versus mode. In the arcade mode you pick a character and go through a set of fights eventually fighting Seth. Before it begins you see a short animated scene showing the character's story. Then when you beat Seth there is another animated ending. The animation is done pretty well but the voice acting could be a bit better. I think it would have been better to leave in the Japanese and put subtitles.

If you are a fan of the Street Fighter series check this game out. But be prepared to possibly invest in a special controller for the game. Right now there are two on the market. One is the Fight Pad and looks like a 360 controller with a different button layout and no sticks. The other is the Fight Stick which looks like a standard arcade stick. But the pad is around $60 and the stick is $150. But again do not go online unless you are very confident of your skills.

My score: 8.0/10