Review: Street Fighter 4
The thing about fighting games is that the initial experience is the actual experience. Unlike games like Resident Evil, Little Big Planet and Bioshock – what you experience in your first hour in terms of graphics, gameplay and story progression is pretty much it.
Like I said before, the game showed promise although it’ll be nowhere near as enjoyable as Street Fighter II was back on the Super Nintendo. But many people are saying that it’s the first Street Fighter to feel like Street Fighter II since … Street Fighter II. And overall, the game’s not bad at all … but I can definitely see areas that can be improved.
Street Fighter 4 is a game that is simple but has a lot of depth to it with various levels of challenges. You have a Trial mode, which is a training mode, and you also have a survival, time attack and an arcade mode. Those are your offline choices. For the time attack and survival mode there is an easy mode with 20 levels and a hard mode with five levels. To prevent the games from being the same thing, they offer certain perks for each game. For example, at first your defense is high and theirs is low and as you continue on the playing field evens out. It’s a relatively gradual way for you to progress and I found that it’s the best way to hone your skills on your favorite character instead of in trial mode.
What Trial mode does is show you the basics, the special moves, then the combos. And despite the fact that the combos are mostly just three moves pieced together, they’re pretty hard to pull off. I’ll admit that there were many times I gave up on it because I was doing the inputs the game wanted me to do, but it wouldn’t register either because your trainer was blocking, which makes no sense, or because I didn’t do it fast enough. It’s a subtle hint that tells you where your skill is. And for most of the characters, I’m always at the halfway point. It doesn’t help that some of their directions for pulling off these moves are very vague. For a fake kick with Sagat I’m told to start with a standing heavy kick, then push heavy kick again. Wha? The game has to be more specific for people like me who haven’t played the game in awhile.
But I actually found the time attack and the survival mode pretty fun. I’ve found that my skill in the game tops off at the middle point for everything. For time attack and survival I get to about level 11 and for arcade mode with my main character I can get to the middle of hard mode. Which I don’t think is terrible for someone who hasn’t played a Street Fighter game for about 20 years. It does show that Capcom successfully pulled off their intention of making it playable for everyone – someone who hasn’t played for awhile and someone whose a veteran.
I get a little iffy at the online part. It can be fun, and it can be frustrating. It seems as if the game doesn’t have dedicated servers for it and that connections are done PS3 to PS3. I really don’t know why this game doesn’t have dedicated servers considering this is one of Capcom’s flagship titles. But, because they seem to connect console to console, when searching based on connection I can barely get anyone higher than 3/5 bars. And connection issues can ruin a fight – even if it’s a split second lag.
Another frustrating part, that’s not at fault of the game, is the people that you meet who will spam the same moves again and again. Most of the time, if I fight someone who does this, I’ll often drop out so that they can’t get any medals or points for it. It’s my personal way of saying “Spam is bad.” And honestly, anyone who think that’s me being cheap is probably the type of player who does just that.
The online system has two forms of play – ranked and player matches. Player matches is where you can invite your friends for a game or just play a few rounds without having to worry about rank, while ranked matches pits you against opponents where you fight for battle points. Medals are offered through various simple tasks – such as winning a round, getting the first hit to the more difficult medals that you get by winning after time has run out or you win via chip damage (defeating someone while they’re blocking, essentially). Taking that into consideration, you can get five to ten medals in a match, depending on how well you do. And if you fight someone who has a lot more battle points that you do, the points earned/lost are very small (like 11 battle points) as opposed to gaining/losing 100 battle points against people in your skill range.
What I do have a problem though, is how the game matches you up with your opponent. The system runs off battle points for their ranked matches. Generally, you can get between 50 to 100 battle points per game depending on how well you do. But what bothers me is that there are many times I’ll battle someone who has 2000 more battle points than I do. When searching based off of skill, I expected to fight people that were maybe 300 point higher or lower than me … not a 2,000 minimum difference. I also think the game should detect when the same move is being done over and over again and have the character penalized for that. Sure, a person figures out that a move is getting spammed and can just dodge around it, but spamming a move isn’t really skill in my opinion, it’s just a lazy way of trying to get victories. Maybe if players who did the same move over and over again still lost battle points even if they win, then that would force people to use a variety of moves instead of the same one.
The game also incorporates three special moves systems: EX moves, super combo and ultra combo (which I can’t help but hear Ultra Combo from Unreal tournament when I read/say that). It’s a relatively simple system – Ultra combos are available after taking damage. So if you take enough damage, you can unleash a ultra combo that can change the tide of the game. And as you attack, your EX meter fills up. The EX meter has four bubbles that can be filled. Once they’re all full you can use all of them to do a super combo or you can use one bubble at a time to perform EX special moves, which are marginally more powerful than the standard move. For example, Vega’s Sky High Claw can bypass any fireballs thrown at him where regularly a fireball would stop him.
Something new (to me at least) are the focus attacks. Attacks that are basically charged up. If they hit, it stops your character in their tracks and knocks them down, opening them up for a ground attack. But, if they hit you while you charge it and release it shortly afterwards, you reverse it and recover the damage that would have been done to you if you were hit. It gives you the option of chancing a reversal move or trying to do a charged move which will damage them more and leave them open for another attack.
The controls are similar to Street Fighter II and I doubt it’s changed much since then, but I’ve found that with the exception of your normal moves, you’re left with two open buttons which you have to choose if you want to use them for your Light/Medium/Heavy all-in-one attacks (great for ultra combos), focus attacks or a taunt. I would have liked to have seen the option of specifying whether I would use the analog or D-Pad for movement and whatever input I didn’t use could be used as additional buttons. (i.e. up, down, left, right could be used for focus attacks, etc.) That may have made it less challenging to pull those moves off so maybe that’s why they decided against it.
The arcade mode is what you’d expect out of it and it hasn’t radically changed since the original Street Fighter II. I’ve read that Seth was a overly cheap character. I agree to that to an extent that if he gets your hands on you, you’re in for a series of combos, but if you’re able to break out of it it’s pretty easy to chain combos on him as well. I imagine he would be a major pain in the ass on the hardest difficulty level though. I find Fei Long to be an extremely cheap character. A specific move where he dashes and punches you (up to three consecutive times) is used all the time. And when I finally tried him out in Trial mode, I found out that to do the move you have to do three consecutive Hadokens (quarter-circle forward and any punch button) to pull that off.
The graphics of the game are very unique but not anything awe-inspiring. I do like that characters have much more emotions now and I love that they kept the game 2D but I wish they would have made the levels more interactive. Mortal Kombat did this with previous games. Simple attacks would move someone to another area in the level (a floor above or below). The levels themselves are pretty forgettable, and that’s a shame. I was hoping for some more levels from Street Fighter 2, not similar ones. I love the Versus screen, though – I thought that was very well done. I love how the “VS” gets painted on.
The main theme for the game is a song called “The Next Door – Indestructible” which sounds like a J-Pop song and gets kinda’ annoying after awhile. Some of the music in the game is based off that song so it quickly gets into your head. But there are some old music themes that come back – they’re subtle, but anyone who played Street Fighter II will be able to pick up on it pretty quickly. There’s a nice mixture of music in there. I’ve always loved the sound of heavy punches and kicks hitting the opponent and like the fact that they give you the option of engligh or japanese voiceovers.
With the arcade, time and survival mode and an addicting online mode and with a free Championship Mode coming out in the future (that’s free, by the way, according to sources but it’s also a rumor, I think … correct me if I’m wrong) this game’s got quite the future ahead of it. Hopefully Capcom will continue to look into new features for this game because Street Fighter is one of those games that people will come back to for a very long time.
And on that note, let’s wrap up the review.
Graphics (10 pts.)
The game took a step in a different direction by giving the look a very drawn feel to it, if that makes sense. They try not to have it look as realistic as possible and it’s a nice change of pace. Expressions are seem on every character for every hit they take. The levels are rather forgettable and bland. But the versus screen is very well done and very well presented. 8/10
Music & Sound Effects (10 pts.)
The main theme isn’t terrible, but it’s present throughout the game so it can get annoying. You are treated to some nice remixes from Street Fighter II – and maybe even later games. Sound effects from hitting/blocking sound almost exactly like it did 20 years ago and it’s a very satisfying feeling when they pull through. 8/10
Gameplay & Controls (25 pts.)
The controls aren’t terrible but haven’t evolved much – you still have light, medium and heavy punches and kicks. After mapping those out you’re left with two extra buttons (generally R2 and L2) that you can map to a Light/Medium/Heavy punch or kick (ideal for ultra combos) a taunt or a focus attack. The R3 and L3 buttons aren’t used which would have been nice as someone who uses the D-Pad, but makes sense because that would be frustrating to those who play using the analog stick. The gameplay is normal to a standard Street Fighter game, the intros and outros of your characters are short and the endings in particular don’t seem to tell the full story. The game isn’t too hard (I’m able to clear it up to Medium-Hard and get halfway through hard) but certain characters can be deliberately cheap: Seth, if he gets a hit in, and Fei Long. 20/25
Story and Presentation (20 pts.)
The game is presented very much like you’d expect to see it presented in the arcades. Character selection, VS mode and post-match animations look very much like it would in an arcade game. The stories are very vague. You are often times left with seeing and ending and wondering exactly what happened afterwards. And honestly, it should have been done better. Maybe even lock off half of the ending so that it’s only viewable at the later difficulties. But if the same ending you get on easiset is the same one you get on hard mode, then it just seems like those were an afterthought. 10/20
Fun Factor (25 pts.)
The game can be fun and frustrating, it all depends on who and how you’re playing. Online play can be real frustrating if you have a bad connection. Offline, some characters have a tendency to be cheap and can often ruin the fun when you find you’re getting no real chance to react unless you react at the exact right time. The offline difficulty raises appropriately – it doesn’t get too tough too quick. 20/25
Replayability (10 pts.)
The game offers a total of 25 different time attack and survival modes, six difficulty arcade mode, a five round trial mode and an online play that incorporates battle points and medals. The game may lose interest when you reach your skill peak until you are able to improve even more but some people may just give up after that. And for those who love to collect things, you have hundreds of titles and a lot of icons to collect. All this packaged together can give this game some great replayability. But again, if you find you’re not making any progress for a few weeks despite a good effort, that may be enough to have some players put the game in the case and move onto another game. 9/10
Total score is 74 pts., giving this game 3/5 invaders.
