Streets of Rage (Master System)
Categories:
[blog]
Tags:
[review],
[video games],
[master system]
note: played on normal difficulty
I wasn't quite sure how much to expect from this version... but I wasn't expecting to finish it on my first go (especially in a sickened, drug-hazed state). The first thing to note is that any damage taken by your character is represented very poorly, very often you're hit and barely notice. Very little feedback in this manner. In fact it's quite easy to make the game do weird things in general, like you throw the enemy but they just stand there. Almost like Guile's Magic Throw from sf2... but they don't get hurt. Quite a bit of weird stuff like that.
Probably unsurprisingly there's a hard limit to 2 enemies on screen at any one time, which makes things considerably easier.
Then there are enemies that are incredibly easy to defeat... some of the 'stronger' female enemies simply drop to their knees when hit once, you walk away a little, they get up, and you can hit them again. Repeat until they die. The only fly in the ointment here is the weird way that your autocombo can work, if it fires at the wrong time it can cost a hit here. So press punch an extra time to get around that.
So bosses... are really easy. Most can just be defeated by mashing punch as hard as possible when they run at you. For some reason the auto combo hardly ever works properly, and you can just drain their entire lifebar like this. Doesn't work for the twins boss though... so to defeat them... just jump kick over and over.
So bloody hell you go through all this and the the final boss you can just mash punch to beat as well.
At least the stages follow fairly closely to the MD version, you even get the elevator level that you can throw etc people off the ledge with, which is still just as fun.
The music... is... kind of OK I guess. I think it's mainly trying to ape the MD soundtrack, and in a couple of places it does. Otherwise I suppose the SMS just can't do it justice.
I can't REALLY imagine going back to play this. Especially since there's not even a 2-player mode. It just feels... a bit boring... in comparison to the MD version :(