Day Five: Streets of Fury EX
Season's beatings
Hon hon hon! It’s time to go to the mean streets of Paris, France to beat up some thugs in a game that looks like a fake videogame someone would be playing on Smiling Friends. It’s time for Streets of Fury EX.
Read on to find out why this game will have you shouting “SACRE BLEU!” in pure joy.
What is it?
Streets of Fury EX is a 2D sidescrolling beat-’em-up. You pick from a large cast of 22 characters and embark on a quest to send every gangster in Paris to the emergency room. Use a large variety of attacks to create ridiculous fighting game style combos where you juggle enemies around, chaining punches into special moves and even super moves. It combines a traditional beam-em-up with Marvel vs Capcom combos, and it works.
Each character has a lot of different attacks. There’s three main offense buttons: Light attacks, heavy attacks and special attacks, which cost stamina. Each button can be combined with a direction input for different moves, like in Super Smash Bros. For example, up and special will give you an uppercut, and side plus special will give you a dash. With each character getting four different attacks on each button and three super moves, that comes out to fifteen techniques per character, and that’s not counting the aerial attacks, so you’ll be busy for a while mastering all of them.
When the roles reverse and you become the punchee instead of the puncher, you have a few defensive tools to help keep you safe. There’s a block, which you can hold to protect yourself from strikes. It drains your stamina, so keep an eye on that. Some enemies can also break your guard with special attacks, so turtling up isn’t a foolproof plan. You can dash, which can be used to dodge things, and you have a parry. If times right, you can parry an incoming attack and leave your opponent stunned and follow up for massive damage. If you mis-time your parry, you’ll drain your stamina, and you’ll be unable to block, parry or use special moves until it recovers, so mind your timings.
There’s another, more unique way of dodging danger: side-stepping. This game doesn’t play like a traditional belt-scroller, where you can move up and down freely. It has a three lane system. Instead of moving up, you hop up to the top lane, which is the furthest from the camera, or you can hop down closer to the foreground. This weird quirk is directly taken from the game Guardian Heroes, which this game takes a lot of inspiration from. The system is strange at first, but after a few minutes, you can get the hang of it and it becomes second-nature.
Streets of Fury takes more inspiration from Guardian Heroes in its enemy count. There are some screens where you’ll be taking on over a dozen thugs at once. It might seem like a lot, but thanks to the game’s large hitboxes, you can hit a lot of them at once, letting you make quick work of them. It’s also really satisfying to catch a huge group of thugs in a fifty hit combo.
The enemies in the game won’t just stand around and let you do all your fancy combos on them. They’re very aggressive, and they’ll try to hit you whenever possible. They’re varied, too. Some are quick and attack from up close, others are really slow and can break your guard. There are even some that can attack from different lanes. Each has their own unique behavior that feels like it was tailor-made to exploit a specific mechanic. They get combined a lot, too. It’s not just one type of guy, although the game likes to throw fifteen of the same guy at you every now and then.
It plays like a weird, but well made beat-’em-up from the arcade days, with a few new touches. It’s tough, thanks to its relentless enemies, but you can always pick from one of your many attacks to keep them at bay.
Short
Even with so many enemies and a focus on long combos, the game doesn’t feel like a slog. It has two campaigns, each can be finished in around an hour. They’re meant to be done in one sitting, but you can save and quit at any point and come back to it when you feel like it.
Two hours for the game isn’t much, but this is an arcade game, it’s meant to be replayed over and over. Starting off, it’s tough, so you won’t get through it in your first attempt. Then there are a ton of characters to unlock and mess around with. There’s a survival mode, and a challenge mode. All of this can be played with three of your buddies in four player co-op. It’s local only, sadly. No online play here.
The game is great to pick up and play for a while. Every now and then I do one of the campaigns, or boot it up to do some survival for a while. Its great core gameplay and tons of unique characters make it very replayable.
Worse Graphics
The game looks hilarious. It uses digitized sprites like Mortal Kombat did back in the day. They took a few people off the street, paid them a couple of dollars and had them act out some martial arts. The result is a hilariously weird looking aesthetic that looks like the kind of fake game they’d play on a TV show. It looks wonky, but it has a lot of soul. You can tell most of these actors can barely throw a punch, but that just adds to the charm. Seeing a bunch of clones of the same guy on screen, with some of them scaled up to twice their size, combined with the photo-realistic visuals, is really funny.
The backgrounds could use some work. They’re low-poly street stages with some graffiti and minimal detail. It looks like a cheap green screen, which is pretty funny, I gotta admit.
The whole game has a very home made look to it. It reminds me of old YouTube videos like the Angry Video Game Nerd where they’d greenscreen themselves into a game. It has that same scrappy do-it-yourself vibe, which I love.
The soundtrack is good, too. It’s a constant stream of upbeat, synthy house music with steady, driving percussion. It sounds like the inside of an arcade circa 1997. Perfect for beating up some scallywags.
Made by People Paid More to Work Less
Judging from the game’s production values, I wouldn’t say they were getting paid much. This was a group effort between two developers and a bunch of their buddies. They had a clear vision, they executed on it and it shows they had a ton of fun doing it. This is a passion project through and through, and I can’t think of anything better than making a cheesy game with your friends.
The developers of this game, Guard Break, would go on to work with SEGA on Streets of Rage 4, one of the best beat-em-ups in recent years. After that they went on to make Absolum, which is another great beat-em-up. They seem to enjoy what they do and had complete creative control over Streets of Fury. They put in a lot of work, but it was the kind of work you’re glad to do, which is better than working at EA.
Conclusion
You should play Streets of Fury Ex. It’s a great game made by passionate developers who love and understand beat-em-ups. It’s well-paced, with good combat encounters. It has tough enemies with different strategies, a ton of playable characters with unique moves and a fun combo system. Even if you’re encouraged to juggle enemies, they don’t feel like punching bags, and even when you get overwhelmed by twenty copies of the same guy, it doesn’t feel cheap or unfair.
Pick up Streets of Fury Ex for only $10. It’s only a few hours long, but you’ll want to keep coming back for more, as any good arcade game should do.
If you’re still not convinced, the how about this? You can play as the Nostalgia Critic. It’s not a mod. He’s really in the game. That’s alone is worth the price of admission.
