Streets of Rage 4 Announced, First Trailer Released

Today in “news I have no idea how I feel about”: a new Streets of Rage game has been announced. Almost twenty five years have passed since the last entry, and someone has suddenly decided the series needs to go on. There’s literally no info about Streets of Rage 4, apart from what you can deduce from the trailer they’ve released, so scroll on down for a detailed breakdown.

The game is being developed by Guard Crush Games, the team behind Streets of Fury, which is a positively received beat-em-up from a few years back. The drawings and animation are being handled by Lizardcube, they of Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap fame. DotEmu will be publishing the game, with a presumably pricey blessing from Sega.

Now that we’ve got that out of the way, let’s look at the video. It starts of with a panorama of the skyline of the once peaceful city, which I’m beginning to doubt was ever peaceful. Then we’ve got a couple of close shots introducing Axel. Axel has a beard now! He’s a bit older and more jaded, but still angry as ever.

Then there’s Blaze. She looks even younger than before, and is dressed in an even skimpier outfit. Finally, we get to see a few really quick shots of the game in action. It looks gorgeous, but all the enemies from the trailer are just recycled goons from the first three games. The final scene includes Evil Rihanna with a big snake and our man Axel running towards her, grinding his glove against the asphalt.

It’s all backed up by music that sounds like a cheap copy of Kavinsky, and a number of fans have been asking about Yuzo Koshiro and his possible involvement in the project. The man himself tweeted that he can’t say anything about it at this point, which sounds suspiciously like they’re still negotiating behind the sceens. Hopefully that’s what it is, because all I want from this is a new Yuzo Koshiro album.