It’s fun coming back to a game you haven’t played in years, especially after having gotten much better at doing them. In this case this applies to fighting games. Since this game I’m reviewing came out I think I’m better at beat em ups so let’s see how that affects my review of this.
Before I begin the review proper, I will be reviewing Ultra Street fighter 4 aka the final version of this game (unless Capcom does what they did with 2 and release a super mega final version decades later to capitalise on nostalgia).
Where to begin with Street Fighter 4. It’s the game that reinvigorated the fighting game genre and made it bigger than it had been even in the heyday of Street Fighter 2 and Mortal Kombat. You can defend SF3 as much as you want but it was eclipsed by 4 in both gameplay and sales. It also had the old trend of the name updates as it was just before DLC became the go to way to update the games. The roster at the first home version being 25 characters going all the way to 44 different characters by Ultra.
The big feeling I got playing this, was like playing SF2 again. Not in a sense it feels like an old game. But it felt like it was capturing that feeling of when SF2 was new, of that excitement from that game. Of Course it’s far more advanced than that old game, and despite some annoyances felt far more fair than 2 would feel playing against a computer foe. I’m no amazing fighting game player but, so often I would feel a sense of BS when fighting computer controlled fighters in those old games. This one, I could get a sense of fighting and beating them on higher difficulties.
The return of the bonus stages helps give that sense of going to recapture that thrill of SF2, with the car destruction and barrel stages returning. You can turn them off when playing arcade mode if you feel that interrupts the flow of your run through.
Arcade mode is your single player and the only source of the story in the game. This was before Mortal Kombat came back and introduced us to a big multi chapter story mode for fighting games, and before SF5 tried and failed at doing that. You get a small little introduction with stills at the start for your character, before the final boss you fight your rival with a small cutscene most of the time showing why they are fighting, and then after the final boss is down you get a properly animated cutscene for that character.
There are also 4 bonus bosses you can fight by doing well in arcade ranging from beating arcade mode with 2 perfects and never losing a round to unlock the fight, up to that plus finishing the round with a super or ultra combo and finishing the finishing the final boss with one to get the final ultra boss ONI.
A feature for the versus mode that isn’t in the arcade mode (to my annoyance) is that much like the anniversary version of SF2, you can pick which edition’s version of that character you want to play as. So say you’re selecting Ryu or one of the characters in every edition, you can select if you want to play as the original, the super, the arcade or the ultra version of Ryu. There is also the Omega version which are a lot stronger as they turned up a lot of the abilities such as making it easier to chain in hits into combos plus introducing new moves.
This is before the “modern” play style introduced in recent games like 6, so sadly we don’t have the easy combos and instead you get those BS timing that on challenges needs to be constantly pixel perfect to pull off a move without them blocking. Though I am happy to say I finally now can get the Raging Demon done consistently which instantly made Akuma my go to character (that’s the move he used to kill Bison at the end of SSF2T if you got to him), still getting used to his teleporting though but practicing.
Thanks to it being an older game now, plus with there being 2 major titles made after it, getting SSF4 on steam is relatively inexpensive, especially if you wait for a sale, best you play with a controller though. And no I haven’t played against other humans in it. The only people near enough to do that are my boss and my mother. And I don’t think she would appreciate dying a thousand deaths.
Rating: 🎮🎮🎮🎮🎮
