Developers: LizardCube, Guard Crush Games
Publisher: DotEmu
Available on: PC, NS, PS4, XBO
Number of Players: 1-4 Local, 2 Online
Price: $25
Version Played: PC
It's been 28 years since Streets of Rage 2 came out. Beat 'em ups have come a long way since then. Capcom threw everything but the kitchen sink at the genre with Battle Circuit in 1997, Double Dragon Advance brought a classic series back with re-imagined combat in 2003, and more recently, the bar was raised even higher by games like Fight'N Rage and River City Girls. In my opinion, it’s the depth of the combat that makes a great BEU. Streets of Rage 4 plays like a game made in a bubble, though. It feels like it's purposely ignoring everything BEUs have done since SOR2.
Streets of Rage 4 is basically SOR2 with juggles. It feels more like a sequel to SOR2 than a sequel to SOR3. It's slow and feels like a step backwards from SOR3 in terms of mobility. I get the feeling that the developers balanced the game around local co-op, where you can juggle enemies back and forth, and don't constantly feel like you have to be everywhere at once, so they only gave a run to Cherry, one of the 2 new characters in the game. I understand wanting to make each character unique, but there are better ways to do that. Characters in SOR4 just feel like they're missing essential tools. This might have been okay if the online didn't suck, but it’s absolutely worthless, and not everyone has people to play with locally. Most of the time, I played the game alone, with Blaze, and I always felt like I was missing something. Having to slowly walk across the screen to get to an enemy is tedious. Maybe if the game was in 4:3, it wouldn't feel so slow, but it's not 1992 anymore. The lack of running makes the game feel archaic.
None of the main characters have SOR3’s vertical dodge rolls, either. They could really use them, though! A lot of enemies and bosses have attacks which have them quickly running or jumping all the way across the screen, or shooting guns, and your only way to avoid them is by slowly walking up and down, or using a defensive special and giving up health anyway. Again, it feels like I'm missing an important tool here. This becomes increasingly frustrating as you work your way into the higher difficulties, where you fight faster and more aggressive enemies with even more armor.
I say “main characters” because you can unlock all the SOR2 and SOR3 characters (minus Roo/Victy the Kangaroo) in their original, pixelated, 16-bit forms. These old-school characters have all the old moves, including running and rolling for the SOR3 characters, but lack some of the moves designed around keeping juggles going, like off the ground attacks and air specials, so they feel kind of handicapped when compared to the SOR4 characters. I really don’t like using any of them. You unlock characters as you get points for beating stages in the game, and the SOR3 characters are the last ones you unlock, so you have to play quite a bit to get them, too.
Streets of Rage 4 lacks the depth of games like River City Girls, but it is still fun. I like the juggles and the moment to moment combat, even if I feel like I don’t always have the tools to do what I want. The way you can regain the HP you use on specials by doing damage before getting hit again is pretty cool, too. SOR4 plays like a better SOR2, and I think SOR2 still holds up, so I can’t say I don’t like it. I just think it would have been a lot better if it had running and rolling. Some fighting game input moves would have been cool, too. SOR4 feels shallow, even when compared to Capcom's games from 20+ years ago.
Streets of Rage was never a real arcade game, but it was always structured like one. Not SOR4, though. You get infinite continues in Story mode, but there is no mode in which you can just continue right where you died and pick another character as if you’ve put another quarter into the machine, like in the Genesis games. If you die, you restart the level, and if you’re playing co-op, you just have to wait until the other players die or beat the stage to continue.
SOR4's modes remind me more of games like Devil May Cry than SOR. After you beat the story and unlock Stage Select mode, you can play whatever stage you’ve reached in any difficulty. So say you beat the story on normal, you can now go into Stage Select and play any of those levels again to farm points or go for better grades. Cutscenes still play in Stage Select, and you keep unlocking new levels as you play through the game again on higher difficulties, so there really isn't much reason to keep playing Story after unlocking Stage Select mode. Your lives are reset to the difficulty's default after every stage in Story, too, so the only real difference in playing Story is that you can use Assists after dying. Assists give you more lives and special moves, but cut your score by some percentage.
There is a mode called Arcade, but it's actually a 1 credit clear mode. You always start from the beginning, you can't save your progress, and you don't get any continues, but your lives aren't reset after beating a level. There's also a Boss Rush and a Battle mode in the game. Battle doesn't have a VS CPU option; though, so I only played it online, and that sucked. Online is just terrible in all modes. It's always like playing in slow motion.
I feel like this game’s focus strayed too far away from the arcade style of the Genesis games. Beat ‘em ups were never about letter grades, high scores, Boss Rush, or the tacked on VS modes. Leaving out something as obvious as a real arcade mode in Streets of Rage, when your main influence is obviously SOR2, is just beyond me. This game can never be that game you play with relatives during the holidays, like an old Ninja Turtles arcade game on MAME, in this state.
This game does look amazing, though. I think LizardCube's comic book style really works for Streets of Rage. The 2D shading techniques really give the game a gritty sort of look, even if it's very different from the rough, pixelated look of the Genesis games. I think the new character designs strike a good balance between the anime and comic book styles, and look pretty cool for the most part, too. I think they did a good job making the characters look like their 16-bit versions while aging them and bringing them into HD. I don't really like how Axel aged 20 years while Blaze and Adam only aged 10, though. I especially love the backgrounds. They’re all so detailed and full of little references. I saw stuff that reminded me of SOR, TMNT arcade and NES games, Final Fight, Street Fighter, and even Shinobi.
Streets of Rage 1 and 2 (not 3!) were always known for their great soundtracks, so SOR4 had a lot to live up to. There's definitely some good tracks in SOR4, but there are also some stinkers. I know SOR had all sorts of music genres on Genesis, but some of these tracks in SOR4 just feel out of place. The game abruptly transitions from an awesome, SOR2 stage 1 remix by Yuzo Koshiro to some wacky EDM mess right in the middle of the first level, for example. I wish Koshiro had done the whole thing. He's obviously the man to go to for SOR music. He only did a handful of songs, though. The rest of the soundtrack is pretty hit or miss. Too much dubstep.
I'm trying really hard to be positive here because this is not a bad game, but it makes me mad just thinking about it. If they wanted me to play this like a Devil May Cry game where I keep playing it on harder difficulties, then they should have made the combat Devil May Cry quality. It's a fun game, it looks great, and it feels like SOR, but I expected more from a modern BEU. It's just not in the same league as stuff like River City Girls, or even 23 year old Battle Circuit. I'll still go back to this if I ever get the chance to play it in local co-op; though, because that seems like the best way to play it, and I didn't get to do that.
Publisher: Nintendo
Developer: Nintendo EPD
Available On: Nintendo Switch
Price: $60
Animal Crossing is many things to many people. For some, it’s all about collecting every piece of furniture in the game. For me, it was always about decorating my home with all the Nintendo stuff and interacting with my villagers. New Horizons isn't just about decorating your home; though, you have to decorate the whole island, and I have yet to see a single Nintendo item. Villagers don’t seem to leave their clothes at each other’s houses as much, either. Animal Crossing has changed a lot since New Leaf. I know there’s been 3 Animal Crossing games since New Leaf, but I didn’t play any of them! I don’t think they’re canon anyway.
Coming from New Leaf, I was blown away by how much AC has improved in terms of UI and ease of use. First of all, you get a lot more bag space in New Horizons. In New Leaf, you got 16 bag spaces. People got around this limit by keeping 10 opened letter envelopes on them at all times and stuffing their tools in them to free up bag space. You can’t carry envelopes around anymore, but there's no need to. You can have up to 40 bag spaces now. You have to make a little progress in the game before unlocking them, but that’s not hard to do. Oh, and fruit stacks now! Game changer. I still run out of bag space while doing my daily routine, but nowhere near as often as in previous games.
Equipping your tools is much easier now thanks to the new item wheel. It’s very similar to item wheels in other games, like Monster Hunter World and Zelda Skyward Sword. When you make or buy a tool, like an axe, umbrella, or slingshot, it’s automatically set to one of the slots on your item wheel. You can also do this manually by clicking on a tool in your inventory. You can then simply press up on the d-pad to bring up the wheel and then select a tool to equip with the left stick. You can also press left and right on the d-pad to scroll through all the tools in your bag. This saves a lot of time and makes your daily island routine much easier.
Home decoration has gotten a major overhaul. You don’t have to get in the right position, drop something, and then push it around anymore. You can now go into an overhead view in which you can quickly move furniture around and hang stuff on the walls with a cursor. You can also access both your character’s inventory and your home’s storage in this mode and place furniture, or even change the wallpaper and flooring, directly from them. It’s really easy to use and makes decorating your home a breeze.
New Horizons gives you full control over where everything is built. Your house, bridges, stores, your neighbors’ houses, everything. You won’t have villagers moving in right on top of your orchards anymore. When you’re about to get a new house or building in town, Tom Nook will give you an item which you can use to mark where the building will go. It even lets you preview how the building will look there. It’s pretty awesome. I love the amount of control you’re given over the town, and you’re not even the mayor here!
This is still a game in which you can make your own fun and set your own goals, but you can get some kind of direction now, if you want. Tom Nook and Isabelle always have something to say about how your island is coming along and what you could do to improve it, even before unlocking star ratings. There’s also the equivalent of achievements and MMO-like daily quests. This is the Nook Miles system. It’s a rewards program. You get Nook Miles for doing everything from watering flowers to getting fossils assessed. There’s a bunch of achievement-like long-term goals, like wishing upon 300 shooting stars, and there’s always 5 smaller things you can do to get more miles. You might get one that gives you 100 Nook Miles for changing your clothes, and when you complete that one, another one will pop up that will give you some Nook Miles for catching a certain kind of butterfly or selling fruit. There’s always something you can do to get Nook Miles. You can spend Nook Miles on special furniture, recipes, clothes, and tickets to go to tiny deserted islands, which you can completely destroy and strip of all resources with no consequences.
Like I mentioned earlier, the focus of New Horizons isn't really about decorating your home, it's about decorating the whole island. Frankly, I had trouble warming up to the idea. The Japanese name is Animal Forest, after all. I don’t want my town to end up looking like the suburbs! It’s not really an option, though. That’s the game now. There’s only so much you can get out of it by only decorating your own home. Getting a 3 star rating unlocks KK Slider concerts, roads, and terraforming, for example. So I planted more flowers, put a bunch of furniture in my villager’s yards, and built fences around their houses. And you know what? I got into it. It’s a lot of work, since the home decorating view is not available outdoors and you have to place and move everything the old-school way, but it's fun. It’s creatively fulfilling in a way. But eventually, what I wanted to do with the island and the game’s mechanics clashed.
You see, New Horizons has a huge focus on crafting, which I guess comes from Pocket Camp, but I didn't play that. You can still buy furniture, find it on trees, and trade your neighbors stuff you don't want for it, but a huge chunk of it can only be crafted. You can't just look up the recipe on a Wiki and make it; though, you have to find and learn the recipe first. The problem with this is that opportunities to get recipes are pretty rare and random. Nook's Cranny only has a few you can buy. You have to find the rest in balloons, bottles washed ashore, or get them as gifts from neighbors. So I was constantly fighting my recipe app's limits while trying to decorate my way to a 5 star island as fast as I could. Compromises had to be made.
This a straight up Breath of the Wild-like crafting system, by the way. When you shake trees in New Horizons, branches fall down; when you hit trees with your axe, logs pop out; and when you hit rocks with your shovel, rocks and metal ore fly out of it. Even weeds and seashells are crafting materials now. Instead of filling my storage with furniture and clothes, I filled it with crafting materials. I don’t just shake my trees every day to get furniture, I hit them with a blunt axe to get 3 pieces of wood off them, too. A lot of my playtime consists of hoarding crafting materials. I feel the same way about the crafting in ACNH as I did about Breath of the Wild’s crafting, I don’t think this actually makes the game more fun. In fact, I think it’s a grind.
Once you get a 3 star rating, you unlock the Island Designer app on your NookPhone. This app lets you make different kinds of roads and trails, cliffs, rivers, and ponds. It’s a powerful tool, but a very clunky one to use. You actually have to use it one tile at a time. Want to build a dirt road that connects all homes to Nook’s Cranny? That could take a while. And what if you decide you want that dirt road to be cobblestone instead? You’ll just have to do the whole thing over again. One tile at a time. The tool feels like some kind of addon. It just doesn’t feel like the game was made with this ability in mind considering how finicky and hard it is to use compared to how easy it is to move furniture around in your home.
Another thing that really slows progress down is how you have to wait a day for anything to be built or demolished. After upgrading Tom Nook's office, you unlock the ability to move buildings around, build bridges and inclines, and have them demolished. All these things take 1 day to complete. That doesn’t sound too bad when you say it like that, but say you want to move a neighbor’s house a few tiles up so it lines up perfectly with their neighbor’s house. You’d have to move the house out of the way away one day, and then move it where you really wanted to move it on the second day because you can’t build a house somewhere where it touches another house, even if that house isn’t going to be there when that house is moved because it’s the same house. The same goes for changing the style of a bridge. You can’t just change the bridge’s style, you have to demolish the bridge one day and then build a new one the day after. You’re also limited to 1 building move and bridge, incline, or demolishing per day, so it’s not like you can remodel the whole island at once. It would take you at least 6 days to remodel 3 bridges, for example.
New Horizons isn’t exactly a Switch graphical showcase, but it does look nice. Everything is still pretty low poly, but these aren’t 3DS models, and the textures are much more detailed than ever before. I especially love how all the villagers look like they’re stuffed animals or something. There are also a lot of cool effects going on, like shiny wet surfaces when it rains, and depth of field when you talk to villagers. The lighting is really nice, too. It changes depending on the time of day and casts shadows in different directions. It’s a small thing, but it makes everything look great.
There’s definitely some frustrating things about New Horizons, but I still think it’s an amazing game. I can play this all day or just check in on it for 30 minutes while I focus on playing another game. I can always get something out of it. I never felt like that with past games because everything shut down at night. The future looks bright for support from Nintendo, too. We’ve already seen a few updates and events, and there’s more to come. Even if I start playing less now that I got a 5 star island, I’ll definitely keep coming back for the events.
Developer: WayForward
Available on PS4, Wii U, 3DS (DSiWare), PC
Version Played: PC
Price: $10
Shantae: Risky’s Revenge is the sequel to 2002’s Shantae for GBC and the second game in the Shantae series. It’s still a Metroidvania in the same style as the first game, but with a lot less meat on its bones. It was originally released on the Nintendo DSi in 2010 as one of the launch games for the DSi Shop. From what I’ve heard, it was supposed to be a GBA game at one point, and a 3 part episodic game on WiiWare at another. It feels like they never even completed part 1, though. Risky’s Revenge just feels like it’s trying to make a dollar out of fifteen cents, if you know what I mean.
Risky’s Revenge fixes a lot of the problems with the first game, but doesn’t carry over many of the good things from the original. The biggest problem with Risky’s revenge is that it’s severely lacking in the best parts of Shantae, the dungeons! There are only 3 dungeons in Risky’s Revenge. That’s 1 less than the first game, but only 2 of them are traditional dungeons. The second dungeon is just a quick race through a bunch of enemy filled rooms. It takes maybe 10 minutes to complete, and it’s not challenging, creative, or even all that fun. This would literally be some cave where you get a heart container at the end in a Zelda game. The third dungeon isn't much fun, either. The only really good, non-gimmicky dungeon in the game is the first one. The last level is a weak Mermaid Shantae shoot ‘em up level, which is not anything close to what I’d call a dungeon.
The bulk of the game consists of running around hunting items and talking to NPCs. It feels like filler, but thankfully, the overworld is much better than the first game’s, so it’s not all bad. There's lots of little caves to explore and NPCs to do quests for everywhere you go. It’s more fun than most of the dungeons. The Simon’s Quest-like day and night system is gone, so you don’t get the super tough enemies at night, there’s more warp points and you don’t have to collect squids to unlock them, and best of all, the camera isn’t as zoomed in as in the GBC game. Shantae’s sprite isn’t taking up a third of the screen anymore, so you can see what’s up ahead just fine. If you could take the first game’s dungeons and put them in this overworld, you’d have an amazing game.
It’s a shame that this game is so full of filler because it plays really well. Shantae actually feels powerful now. She has a backdash, her hair is longer, she gets hair whipping speed and attack power upgrades, and she uses magic for subweapons now, so you can just refill your magic to keep using them and save your money for new stuff. The whole economy of the game also feels much better because you're not constantly avoiding enemies to survive, you can kill them without much trouble and keep getting money.
Shantae's dancing is also much better implemented. Enemies freeze while you dance now, so she's not a sitting duck while transforming anymore. The input method for the dances is also much better because it's no longer rhythm based, you just hold the dance button down longer to get different transformations.
The animal forms themselves are a bit of a step back from the first game, though. There's only 3 forms here, and 2 of them are the same as in the GBC game. The monkey and elephant forms return, and they're still used for wall climbing and breaking blocks. The only difference is that their relics give you different powers. The elephant can now do a downwards stomp out of a jump to break blocks, and the monkey can do an air dash off walls. The new transformation is the mermaid, which allows you to swim underwater. Its relic unlocks a bubble shot you can use to break underwater blocks. The mermaid transformation is okay, but you get it at the very end of the game, and there aren't many places you can use it.
For a game that originally came out on DS, Risky's Revenge looks amazing. The sprite work in this game is better looking than most indie games released today, even at its low resolution. The game is scaled very weirdly, though. The “Original” resolution is 723 pixels high, which looks very small when running in a 1080p screen, and is not a multiple of the DS’s vertical resolution of 192, which could have fit nicely scaled up 5 times to 960p on a 1080p screen. I just played it in “Full” at 1080p so I could actually see what was going on. The PC version also has a weird frame pacing issue. Basically, the game runs at 59fps, and some frames are not being rendered at the same frequency as others, so you see what looks like the game stuttering or skipping frames of animation. Buildings in the background skip across the screen as you run around town, for example. It's more noticeable in the overworld since you're constantly moving and making the backgrounds scroll.
I think the music is okay. It's not the best of the original trilogy's, but it’s not bad. It's by the same composer that did the Pirate's Curse and GBC game's soundtrack, Jake Kauffman. I like the new versions of songs from the GBC game, but I wasn't really impressed by some of the new stuff.
Risky’s revenge is just mediocre and disappointing. It’s like a filler episode of your favorite anime. The world and characters you know and love are there, but there really isn’t much going on. I like how Shantae controls, the overworld exploration and questing are mostly fun, and the graphics are really nice aside from the frame pacing, but it only has 1 good dungeon, and that’s just not enough for a game like this.
Developer: WayForward
Publisher: Capcom
Original Release: Game Boy Color 2002
Also Available On: 3DS Virtual Console
Shantae is probably best known for being super rare. I usually see it going for over $500 on ebay, and that's for loose carts. It came out very late in the Game Boy Color's life in 2002. That's a year after the release of the GBA. It also had a very small print run, so naturally, it didn't sell a lot and it got almost no attention from gaming media at the time. It did manage to get a small cult following, though. Mostly because it was one of the best looking games on the GBC. It was also a revival of the ZeldaII/Simon’s Quest style of action adventure game, which we weren't getting much of around this time.
I remember watching an interview with Shantae co-creator, Matt Bozon, in which he said he envisioned Shantae as the Parodius to Castlevania. If you're not familiar with Parodius, it's Konami's goofy version of their own Gradius and Life Force games. At its core, Shantae is a cute and light-hearted take on Castlevania II: Simon's Quest. It shares a very similar day and night system, looping world map, and upgrade-based progression. It’s a Metroidvania, but more like Zelda II, Rygar, and the Wonder Boy/Monster World games than the more SOTN and Super Metroid-inspired stuff we get so much of today. There’s towns, dungeons, puzzles, NPCs, sidequests, and a cast of lovable characters that are still a big part of the Shantae games to this day.
Shantae’s abilities are also heavily influenced by Castlevania. Her main attack is a hair whip, which works a lot like Simon Belmont’s whip. She has magical hair because she is a half genie. Her Dracula parts, or Power Suit upgrades, come in the form of animal transformations she learns in each dungeon. She can transform into 4 different animals and use their skills to open new paths and reach areas she wouldn’t be able to with her normal abilities. She can transform into a monkey, harpy, elephant, and spider. You can wall jump like Mega Man X in monkey form, ram and break obstacles in elephant form, fly in harpy form, and climb on spider webs and the surface of walls in spider form. This might sound a bit like Wonder Boy III: The Dragon’s Trap, but your mobility and attacks are much more limited in these forms than they are in WBIII. None of them can even attack without a special item. You also don’t have to go back to town to change forms, like in Wonder Boy III, Shantae can dance anywhere to transform.
You can also buy a bunch of subweapons for Shantae, which are also inspired by games like Castlevania and Ninja Gaiden. There's pike balls that rotate around you, fireballs, lightning, and a cream that creates a shadow clone and doubles your attack power. Unlike in later games, Shantae doesn't get any upgrades for her hair's whipping speed or attack power, so the subweapons are the easiest way to increase your damage output. They’re much more important here than in later Shantae games. There are a few permanent attacks you can buy for Shantae, like a rising kick and elbow tackle, but I found them kind of hard to use in combat because of their controls. Remember we're limited to GB controls here. You have to stand still and hold down the attack button for 3 or 4 seconds to do the elbow tackle, for example.
Where I think Shantae truly shines is in its dungeons. There’s only 4 real dungeons, since the last level is more about straightforward platforming, but what's there is really good. They remind me a lot of Zelda dungeons. They’re all about exploration, platforming, and using Shantae’s animal forms to solve puzzles and get past obstacles. There's also a lot of very Zelda II-like key hunting to open locked doors. Like Zelda dungeons, each one has some kind of unique puzzle type or obstacle that requires you to use the animal form you learn in that dungeon, so they all feel very different. I thought the dungeon bosses were all pretty underwhelming, though. They all just felt like pretty standard game bosses. Nothing special about them.
Shantae's overworld is where things start to fall apart. In between dungeons, you have to trek through 2 or 3 huge outdoor platforming areas full of enemies to get to the next town. You can get dances which will teleport you to each town, but you have to get 4 Baby Squids from the dungeons to get them, and you have to get to the town on foot first. You might run across the next dungeon before getting to town, but since you always have to talk to someone in town and do some kind of quest to get the dungeon open, you can’t just go in the dungeon. That means you’ll be going through some of these areas multiple times. This wouldn’t be a problem if Shantae got some kind of hair upgrade to make combat easier, but she never does. The enemies keep getting tougher and tougher, but Shantae’s hair does the same amount of damage throughout the whole game. Near the end of the game, you’re fighting things that take like 5 or 6 hits during the day and then twice as much at night. And since Shantae has no back dash or block, you’re probably going to get hit, too. I guess the game wants me to use subweapons to take care of these enemies, but since Shantae’s special moves are so expensive, I didn’t want to spend a lot of money on subweapons and then have to grind for money. A map would have been nice, too. It all feels very unbalanced.
Another thing that makes the overworld a pain to travel through is how zoomed in the camera is. Shantae is about as tall as one third of the game screen and she’s always right in the middle of the screen when you’re running, so you can’t see very far ahead in any direction, making it really easy to run into enemies and fall down pits. Sometimes, you can’t even see where you can jump, so you just have to make a leap of faith. The areas in between the first and second town, which you have to go through to get to the first dungeon, are by far the worst in this regard. I could see many people having a really tough time getting into this game, or just giving up on it before even making it to the first dungeon. It’s a shame because the dungeons have much better designs that feel right for the game.
Shantae might just be the best looking GBC game. It puts many NES games to shame, and even looks better than some early SNES games. It’s pretty amazing what WF got out of the GBC. There’s games with more detailed sprite work and games doing crazy stuff on GB, like low res pre-rendered backgrounds, but as far as cartoony games go, even those late Zelda and Wario games on GBC pale in comparison. I think the way that colors are used is what makes it look so great. A lot of GBC games used a very small palette and just kind of drew outlines around some objects and let a background color, like yellow or white, fill in the rest, but not Shantae. The animation in this game is so full of personality, too. All of Shantae’s dances, attacks, and transformations look great, and she even has a bunch of cute facial expressions. The framerate is pretty good, too. There are drops, but they’re few and far between. This game feels like it’s getting everything it possibly can out of the GBC. The music is also on another level. It’s not just that it has an awesome soundtrack by Jake Kaufman, who you might know from Shovel Knight and many WayForward games, the audio quality is way higher than most GBC games, too.
I like a lot of things about Shantae, but I can’t recommend it to anyone who’s not already a Shantae fan and willing to put up with the limitations of a Game Boy game. It just feels like a game that would have been much better on PS2, GC, or even GBA, where it could have used more buttons, had a higher resolution, and pulled the camera back a bit. Shantae is just too ambitious for its own good. Hopefully, WayForward remakes it someday because it would probably be amazing.
