SOR:R takes the mildly branching storyline of SOR3 and goes all in with it.

You can also customise the game, like removing the aforementioned rolling, dashing and weapon “health bars” and try and make everything more like the second entry in the series, or turn on blood, dismemberment and guns to make the game feel like it was released on the PS1 during its “we’re cool and edgy, look at us teens!” phase… The back strike has been remapped to a single button as well, for convenience, and unique moves tied to certain weapons is also back alongside dodge rolling up and down the screen, and generally everything feels impactful, solid and great fun to play. The gameplay is the same buttery smooth SOR2+3 style, complete with strike combos, grapple combos, throws, jumping kicks, running attacks and both a medium damage special move done by pressing forwards twice and punch, plus a health-draining special as well as the “calling for backup” style screen-clearing specials seen in SOR1 if enabled in the options. (though I do still find his blatantness amusing…) The “enemy bodies stay on screen” mode is a fun twist, playable Ash… Maybe not so much. I would’ve easily paid full price for this and felt I got every penny’s worth.

Nope! They just saw their intellectual property that they weren’t even using becoming popular and tried their best to kill it dead. It’s such a professional piece of work that you’d think they’d have it taken down so they can then buy the code and release it themselves. I honestly still can’t believe Sega did that. Sadly less than a month later the Sega legal team took the project down and that was that, but the internet being a thing means it’s still easily available to download now, let alone back then when it was the talk of the retro gaming community. Streets of Rage: Remake, which was worked on for nearly 10 years, was finally released to the public in March 2011. Also, a large pool of blood added, just to make sure you know the claws aren’t just for show! The super-large SOR1 boss sprites have been scaled down… a bit. Featuring all levels and enemies from all three games, plus a bunch of new stuff, it was a dream to play through, even after Sega’s legal team shut it down (*grumble, grumble*) The question is, now we have an official sequel, what’s this like to return to? Let’s find out! The franchise was officially dead in Sega’s eyes, not even being included in Sega All-Stars Racing… Luckily for us a bunch of fans got together in 2011 and released an extremely polished and professionally made sequel / remake titled “Streets of Rage: Remake”. So the late 90s and 2000s were devoid of new Streets of Rage.

Streets of rage remake v5.1 download