Streets of Rage Remake

Streets of Rage Remake is an unlicensed Windows remake of the 16-bit Streets of Rage series. This side-scrolling fighting game borrows material and sprites from the three original games to offer a completely new game. Next to familiar locations and enemies, there are also new moves, characters and backgrounds, more colours, different scroll layers, and 34 original music tracks remixed for this version.

The story picks up one year after Streets of Rage 3. Zan discovers a new crime organization that plans to take over the city. As he cannot tackle it alone, he contacts Blaze, who gathers all available help to face this new threat. Zan suspects that Barbon's bar is a cover for illegal arms dealing, and the team starts its investigation there. You can take on the story mode on your own, with the help of a CPU player, or cooperatively with another human player. Certain moves are only possible when two players work together. There is also a battle mode for one-on-one duels. Three more game modes can be unlocked later on: Survival (fight an endless stream of enemies until you run out of health), Flag (hold a single flag as long as possible), and Volleyball.

There are six characters available, from the three series combined: Axel, Blaze, Skate, Max, Zan and Adam, and two unlockable secret characters. The story is told through still images with dialogs. Most of the moves will look familiar, although a lot of new ones have been added as well. There is a button to attack, another one to jump, a third one to launch a health-consuming special attack, and a final one to have the entire screen bombed by police back-up. Attacks can be combined into combos, with over 20 moves per character.

The game can be fine-tuned with a colour editor for the characters (unlockable), and various options such as team damage, the combo and jump type (both were changed in SoR3), the death type, the use of guns, a time limit, a difficulty level and the amount of lives. The game contains 43 locations with multi-path splits and 52 different enemies. Other extras include an image and movie gallery, a cheats screen, various unlockable secrets, and four different endings based on the chosen path.