Didn’t like this as much as the first. Enemies felt more restrictive in how you could approach them and a lot cheaper in how they attacked. Take the jet pack goons, for example. You have to wait until they’re at a specific altitude to air-kick them and even then the attack could miss for no discernible reason. Other enemies, including but not limited to knife-wielding punks, motorcycle riders, agile ninjas, the skull miniboss in level 3, and the boxer in level 5, encourage a passive playstyle where you wait for them to approach and then strike back. It gets especially tedious in the second half where they throw multiple enemies with giant healthbars at you.

The bosses were the biggest letdown. In the first game, they had distinct fighting styles that, with only a couple exceptions, could be learned and beaten without taking damage. Not so here. Either the fighting style is ripped straight from the original, or they constantly jump around in unpredictable patterns to land charge or grab attacks. There’s nothing as creative as the ninja twins, the chubby pyromaniac, or even the boomerang-wielding giant in the first level.

On a more positive note, the audiovisuals are excellent. The graphics and sound effects are a huge upgrade over the original and the music, while not super memorable to me, has great audio samples for a 16-bit game. The characters feel even more distinct. Max and Skate in particular feel powerful and agile, respectively. Each enemy having a unique name and visible healthbar are also nice touches.

Maybe I just haven’t found the right beat ‘em up for me. This was still more enjoyable than the entire Golden Axe trilogy. Maybe the third or fourth entries will be up my alley.

When it comes to discussions surrounding the beat-'em-up genre, the first franchise that immediately comes to mind for a lot of people is Streets of Rage, with the second game in particular being the entry that made the series really kick off. Outside of me occasionally playing something like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles TV: Turtles in Time at an arcade, though, I've never had very much familiarity with side scrolling beat-'em-ups, and I've certainly never beaten one in its entirety, and so I've decided to kill two birds with one stone by diving into Streets of Rage 2. This was one of those cases where I respect and recognize the influence of a game far more than I actually enjoyed it, because while I do understand how Streets of Rage 2 has garnered such a strong legacy over the years, I'd be lying if I said I actually had very much fun with it.

Maybe this is more to do with the game's age than anything, but for an experience that's only about an hour or two long in total, I managed to get sick of the gameplay loop of Streets of Rage 2 quite early on. Even with its roster of four playable characters with their own playstyles, it didn't feel like any of them had a wide enough moveset to keep me that engaged with the slow pacing of the game's eight stages, with some of the more awkward button inputs and situational attacks leading to me using the same three moves for pretty much the entire game due to how much more effective they were. The increasingly frustrating enemies made this go from a slightly repetitive button-masher to something outright tedious, with the sudden influx of enemies (as well as reused bosses) with multiple health bars, annoying gimmicks, and a high resistance to actual combos showing up in practically every segment of every level made these encounters feel like they were going on for forever. Winning a stage or even just one fight in Streets of Rage 2 feels a lot more dependent on luck and RNG than any actual strategy or careful positioning, with the seemingly random hits and grabs deciding to land or not land (regardless of whether or not you are actually standing on the same plane as your enemy and vice versa) making many of the enemy encounters come down to just hoping that you'll land your attacks this time.

Even if I didn't have very much fun with this game, I won't act like there's absolutely nothing to appreciate about it, because if there was one thing about Streets of Rage 2 that stuck the landing for me, it would be its presentation. It's honestly impressive to see a home console game from the early 1990s look just as good as something you'd see in the arcades from that era, as the detailed spritework and backdrops, varied animations, and unique enemy designs gave Streets of Rage 2 a very lively and stylized look. The soundtrack of Streets of Rage 2 was also pretty good, and while I don't think it's one of the best game scores of all time like so many others do, Yuzo Koshiro's energetic synths and techno still fit the game's urban setting. Despite all of this, I'd be lying if I said I had very much fun with Streets of Rage 2, and while I am curious about eventually giving Streets of Rage 4 a shot, I think I'll want to wait a while before I actually do.