BitSnark

Review – Streets Of Rage 2 (XBLA)

When Sega announced their ‘Vintage’ range of games for XBLA, many Xbox Live players were counting down the days until the best of Sega’s 90’s side scrolling series would make its way to them, especially having already been available for download on Nintendo’s own service months previously. Yes, Streets Of Rage 2 is here and in that fine rose tinted tradition is everything you thought it was, without surprising you in anyway shape or form.

What we have here is a completely faithful Genesis/Megadrive port that replicates the Streets Of Rage 2 experience perfectly and as such, rekindles those fond memories of strolling along a street and nailing bad guys with different weapons and attacks. Just like you remember it, Streets Of Rage 2 is a whole dollop more fun when played with a friend in co-op and conversely, is also still just as pointless and bad in player versus player mode as it ever was.

Being a side scrolling fighting game, Streets Of Rage 2 was never going to win any awards for longevity, but the co-op mode, multiple characters that play differently and difficulty modes certainly stretch the experience out a tad, and 400MS points for what you get is a good deal.

Achievement wise, the game ranges from the banal (hit 10 guys with a pipe without dropping it) to the downright mind numbingly insane (get 800,000 points on the hardest difficulty starting with a single life), so don’t look for its uninspired achievements to have you coming back. Ultimately though, as with a great many retro releases, your mileage will vary depending on your love for the game as very little has been changed for this release.

The only updates that this title has received are the mandatory online modes, which are hideously laggy in versus mode (a blessing) and pretty stable in co-op, leaderboards and of course the ‘enhanced graphics’ that each Sega Vintage release provides, by enhanced read blurry.

So there you have it, fans of this old skool genre will find a good time here as the game is every bit exactly as it was. The usual XBLA features don’t really add much, and the achievements are pointless except to achievement farmers, but at 400MS points, you could do far worse and it is still a lot of fun.

Overall Score: 7.4