Beats of Rage

I have been playing beat-em-ups since I was a kid, and I feel like the people who made Beats of Rage would be people that I would have stood shoulder to shoulder with in an arcade back in the early 90s! This is a fantastic beat-em-up and just an absolute love letter to the genre, and it is something that I have played through several times over the years. Granted, you could say that other games have taken what this did and done it better, but for me, this is honestly one of the most important beat-em-ups ever made!

Cleaning Up The Streets

I got a huge kick out of the premise of the story in Beats of Rage. It takes the story of Streets of Rage, where Mr. X is trying to run the city with brute force thanks to his crime syndicate. The twist here is that it is Mr. Y doing it, and the characters, instead of being Blaze, Axel, and Adam, are characters from the King of Fighters series… kinda. They change a few things about the game, but if you are a fan of the KOF games, you will be smiling when you see what they did with characters that I am sure you will be very familiar with.

Back With Some Blast Processing!

If you played the original Streets of Rage on the Sega Mega Drive or Genesis, and if you are from America, Beats of Rage is going to feel very familiar to you. The three characters all share the same basic move set of being able to attack, jump, grab, and so on, but they also have two special moves each, which are best brought out in an emergency situation only! You walk through each stage, putting a beating on enemies, and then you face off against the boss. It is classic, early 90s beat-em-up gameplay, and it works very well and just feels so great to actually play.

Big Chunky Fighters

While the Streets of Rage games look great in all their 16-bit glory, Beats of Rage goes a step beyond that with much larger and more detailed character sprites. Granted, these are modified from the King of Fighters series, but they still look fantastic. The stages are epic, have a real grimy 80s and 90s action movie style about them. I just love everything about the look of the game, but the sound is also great. You may or may not recognize some of the tunes that you hear, but even if you do not, there is no denying that they fit the badass punching in the face and slamming to the ground action that you are partaking in.

Taking It To A New Level

Much like Streets of Rage 2 did, what followed on from Beats of Rage took what was done here and made it better. The open source nature of what they did here has given us some truly epic beat-em-ups, and there are some people out there who only know this as a game engine and do not realize that there was actually a game that came before this. I think that this is a fun game to play, but the footprint it has left on this genre is truly massive, just as big as stuff like Final Fight and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles!

Pros:

• I got a kick out of the 80s action movie story
• The blending of Streets of Rage and KOF is epic
• The actual gameplay feels great
• This is a very important release for the beat-em-up genre

Cons:

• This is great, but there are greater games out there
• I do wish it had a few more characters