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Street Fighter IV

The grandfather of all Japanese-style 2D fighting games has finally returned with a new sequel. Street Fighter II was the original arcade game that spawned countless spin-offs and ports to every imaginable platform and endured as a license to print money for Capcom through the 1990s. While the series degenerated pretty badly along the years, Capcom has finally returned to the roots by modernizing what was proven to work almost 20 years ago with Street Fighter IV.

Street Fighter IV is said to be an attempt to bring the gameplay closer to Street Fighter II and in my opinion Capcom has succeeded in just that. Beneath the new 3D visuals, the underlying gameplay feels accessible, reasonably easy to pick up, yet there is plenty of depth under the surface even for the most seasoned fighting game veterans. While the whole genre has officially all but ignored the PC in the recent years, in reality PC has grown to be the platform of choice for the true hardcore players due to MAME. As arcades are getting rare everywhere except Japan, those looking to play 2D fighting games found that MAME-emulated arcade originals were the best way to play them. In a way, it is about time someone took the PC audience of fighting games seriously.

"The Answer Lies in The Heart of Battle"

As the trailer implies, there is actually a story to Street Fighter IV and the game includes hand-drawn animation clips in the Arcade mode for every character. These clips are actually lifted from Street Fighter IV: The Ties That Bind anime which was included with the collectors edition on the consoles. No such luck with the PC version, but lets be honest - it's all just a bit of window dressing to make the characters look cool. If there is one thing Capcom knows how to do well, it is character design.

Animated Ryu in a story clip.

Ryu character detail as a fight is about to start.

Chronologically Street Fighter IV is set before the events of Street Fighter III games and being a "return to the roots" this is reflected in the character mix and gameplay. While there are plenty of features picked from all the numerous spin-off games of the series, Street Fighter IV actually feels a lot like the good old Street Fighter II Turbo to play.

As playable characters, Street Fighter IV contains the usual gang of tweleve from Street Fighter II and four all-new new characters (Abel, Crimson Viper, Rufus and El Fuerte) as the initial set of playable characters. Additionally, PC and console versions allow you to unlock all three AI-only boss characters of the arcade version (Gouken, Akuma and Seth) and a set of six characters from various spin-off games (Dan, Fei-Long, Sakura, Cammy, Gen and Rose). These additional characters are unlocked by completing the game in arcade mode using various characters. All that adds up to 25 characters in total that you can use and every single one has unique combat style and appearance that has been designed with great care.

Page 1: IntroductionPage 2: GameplayPage 3: Visuals, Performance and ControlsPage 4: Summary, Scoring

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