Me and a friend couch-potatoed for a while and played through Streets of Rage 4--I've never played any of them before, but it's in that same genre of beat em' up arcade-games as Double Dragon and the like. It was quite entertaining, even if I was dramatically,
dramatically, bad at things. It's not even hard combos or anything like that, it's relatively bare-bones and easy to remember, but the mechanics are built around handling heaping helpings of bad guys that get progressively more complex and...well...I am not gud and have never got gud. There. I said it. Still fun, though, even with my character's constant deaths.
Plus, they use that good ol' video-game staple of chicken-dinners that randomly pop out of barrels and lockers that you punch-out for health!
Plots basically an excuse, but the designs for characters, from the main fighters to the villains down even to the mooks that get punched constantly, are all very fun and...semi-stereotypey in the best way? The main characters are a range from a beer-bellied kind of washed-up action-movie type, robot-arms Jaxx-from-Mortal-Kombat-knockoff, to skirt-wearing leather-jacket rocker who reminds me of a badass version of the lady from Streets of Fire (the movie) a LOT. Mooks meanwhile run from Fat cops, blinged-out gangsters, and what look to be Women's Wrestling rejects with mohawks and tube-tops...It's all very....80s/90s action schlock in tone and I'm all in favor of it. Some fun music too (which, according to my friend, has been a selling-point of the series). I actually annoyed her by sitting in the
character-select for, like, a solid two minutes just jamming out.
Very fun distraction, and seemed like there was enough there for a lot of entertainment (on the Normal mode I was getting my butt kicked constantly, and there's three or four more tiers of difficulty from there).
On a random note, I don't know what kind of stripper-parents give their daughters names like 'Blaze' or 'Cherry' (or we can talk about 'Axel' as a son's name for a minute as well), but with the rest of the schlocky action-80s/90s vibe, it works and, at least in the case of 'Blaze' I'm all about it. That'd make a hell of a name that wouldn't invite so much mockery (Cherry, on the other hand...)