Streets of Rage 4

Streets of Rage 4 is the first entry in SEGA's beloved beat-'em-up series in 25 years, developed by Dotemu, LizardCube and Guard Crush Games — and the team behind Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap brings the same gorgeous hand-drawn animation style to one of the genre's most iconic franchises. Axel, Blaze, Adam and other veterans reunite to clean up Wood Oak City, joined by new characters and faced with a new generation of criminals to dismantle.

The gameplay preserves the classic Streets of Rage feel while expanding it with new mechanics. Combos chain together more smoothly, special moves have been reworked with more strategic depth, and the kind of side-scrolling beat-'em-up flow the original trilogy invented is dialed up rather than streamlined. Brand-new moves, kickass tracks, and the iconic characters' updated movesets put the entire roster on the same page as a modern fighting game.

Four-player co-op is the social headline. For the first time in the series, up to four players can team up locally to take back the city. Online co-op for two players covers long-distance friends. Twelve unique stages run through the main campaign, plus a Battle Mode for player-versus-player competition and a Boss Rush Mode for teams that want to test their combat against the toughest encounters in the game.

The soundtrack is one of the project's defining achievements. An all-star line-up of musicians — Yuzō Koshiro and Motohiro Kawashima (the original Streets of Rage composers), Yoko Shimomura (Kingdom Hearts, Street Fighter II), Harumi Fujita (Final Fight), Keiji Yamagishi (Ninja Gaiden) and many more — created new tracks specifically for this entry. A dozen former Streets of Rage characters are unlockable and playable in their original pixel-art versions, with options to play the entire game with the original soundtracks for full nostalgia mode.