“Game feel” is a common term to see in reviews, but it’s one I try to avoid using. It’s meant to capture the undefinable sense of a game feeling nice to play, an emergent property of the controls and their feedback that makes interaction fun. With such a vague definition that encompasses all the game’s qualities, claiming a title is great because of its game feel is like saying “it’s good because it’s good”. The reason I’m breaking my rule here is that Streets of Rage 4 has such good game feel that it’s almost magnetic. I bought it on a whim, only expecting it to be fun but forgettable, like most of the other beat ‘em ups I’ve played. After beating it and doing a little postgame experimentation, I went to uninstall it, but I couldn’t bring myself to do it. I just kept wanting to play more, and ended up beating the game multiple times on the harder difficulties. The best way to explain what made it so addicting is to break down its most simple interaction: walking up to a bad guy and punching him. Firstly, the music you’re hearing in the background is uniformly great, no matter which stage this happens on. The walking and attack animations are fluid and expressive, in a beautiful hand-drawn style that gives everything a comic-book vibrancy. When the punch connects, an impact sound plays that gains bassy power in proportion to the attack’s strength, and an explosion flashes where the attack landed. The enemy’s health bar appears, with a chunk of red representing the damage you dealt, which expands until your combo ends, highlighting how well you’re doing. The enemy becomes stunned and shakes, signifying an opening for more attacks as the vibrant combo meter gets larger and changes color as you lay on more hits. If the attack caused a knockdown, they fly backwards dramatically, thudding and bouncing along the ground. That’s a ludicrous amount of satisfying feedback to be packed into the most basic combat, and it gets even better when you combine it with the joy of figuring out little combos and mastering your characters’ moves. It’s also worth noting that game feel can encompass the things that DON’T happen in the game, like the common beat ‘em up issue of trying to punch enemies the game says are slightly too high or too low to connect, leaving you unsatisfyingly swinging at the air. That didn’t happen to me a single time in all my playthroughs, and while that’s a tiny element, it combines with all those other tiny polishes to make a game that feels rad one hundred percent of the time. If you’re even slightly interested in this foundational genre of video games, or want to see the textbook definition of perfect game feel, you can’t pass this one up.