This doesn’t seem a bad idea but when you couple it with a shallow foreground and massive holes you find yourself either constantly being hit by the drums or falling down the holes! Grrrrr.
One of the early level involves oil drums falling out from nowhere that you can punch at the enemy (now that takes some strength). There are too many annoying levels in SOR3 born from this want. I suppose SOR3 had to try to be different due to how one dimensional beat em ups are. If Sega had brought out a carbon copy of SOR2 they would have been lambasted. Which nicely brings me to the game’s unnecessary “innovation”. This works vertically too via a weird roll, which whilst allowing you to avoid blows you definitely would have taken in SOR3’s predecessors, can easily be done by accident which can be annoying on certain levels. You can now get to the other side of the screen quicker but, when trying to execute the special move where you double tap forward you will find yourself running into blows rather than expertly executing aforementioned Grand Upper. The characters can now run, much like the “charge” in Golden Axe – this has its ups and downs. Even the speech sounds grainier which makes the replacing of “Grand Upper” with “Bare Knuckle!” even more ludicrous. Combined with the god awful sound effects, punching Garcia can feel like fighting a plastic bag, whimsically floating in the wind. Surely the excellent SOR2 gameplay remains? Barely…Įverything is noticeably quicker, the inevitable consequence being that everything feels a lot less satisfying. Okay, so it looks worse and sounds worse. The new tracks actually hurt the ear drums, especially the tune from the god awful (but thankfully short) disco stage and one of the later stages where I swear Yuzo Koshiro has just mashed the keyboard or lined up completely random notes, results in a horrible blurry mess. It’s a sorry state of affairs when the best music in the game was remixed from SOR2. In fact, I think it’s probably up there with Street Fighter 2 as the best gaming soundtrack ever. Well fine, at least it’ll sound good right? Wrong! The score from SOR2 was from a different planet. Blocky sprites on blocky stages does not a work of art make. By trying to add more detail, Sega have made everything look worse! The backdrops have suffered just as much and are unnecessarily cluttered. The first thing I noticed about SOR3 is how much blockier the sprites look and that includes our protagonists as well as their foe. Good to see Blaze back, not so good to see Skate. In Max’s place is Zan but more on him (or…it) later. But what’s this? Where’s crowd favourite Max gone and where on earth is Adam? Well, as it turns out, Adam was just too goddamn busy so he leant SOR2 Axel his SOR1 outfit and thus we have SOR3 Axel.
The title screen is a little bare but the options screen has been ported from SOR2, as too the character select. Where shall we start? Well, on first loading SOR3 everything looks as it should.
Well, that’s a bit harsh but the good points are certainly outweighed by the bad.
My anger stems from the disbelief that they haven’t managed to improve on SOR2 in any way. Why? Streets of Rage 3 is why! Two years after the legendary Streets of Rage 2 graced our television sets, Sega finally released the sequel and it ain’t pretty. Let’s not beat around the bush (pardon the pun), I’m angry, borderline pissed off.