Thankfully, a launch-day patch appears to have cleared this up, however if you have no or limited access to the internet then you’ll have to live with the issue. Such a glitch can and will completely screw up a player’s rhythm, and since it happens randomly it’s hard to deal with. In a fighting game, that is unacceptable. In our play-throughs, USFIV had one major issue, which is that the game would randomly freeze for a fraction of a second. Not all is well in the land of the re-release, however. USFIV also includes an in-game manual that helps to clear up what all the symbols mean on the combo screens, which is great because without some explanation many players would likely be lost. ![]() However, running through the challenges and utilizing the training modes (a LOT) will do wonders to help improve your game. This is a technical fighter, which means that veteran players are far more likely to win against newbies than the other way around. I did have an issue trying to find a ranked match manually, but keeping my Arcade playthrough open to challengers proved to be the smoothest way to get a match going.Ĭontrols are unforgivingly tight, as the series is known for. I was on a wired connection, as anyone playing a fighting game online should be. Playing on a 30 mbps down/5 mpbs up connection, I was able to play against online opponents without a hiccup. The same drop-in arcade-style multiplayer is here, and I am happy to report that the netcode is solid. Watching replays is incredibly satisfying as well. But with this kind of fluid action, the game appears as smooth as butter. However, the frame rate this time around is almost always locked to 60fps, with one glaring exception that we’ll get to in a few paragraphs. Graphically, USFIV looks much the same as the previous generation entry, with an incredibly colorful palette. You can learn their moveset by entering the challenges, or Ultra Challenges, which task you with performing ever more complicated combos against the CPU, which may or may not be taking your punishment while standing still. There are 44 characters in all to master, and they are all available from the start. The console’s default controller is absolutely infuriatingly useless for this game.USFIV includes five new characters, though most of them are new as a technicality only. Rolento, Elena, Hugo and Poison all made appearances in Street Fighter X Tekken, and Decapre is a completely new playable character. You’ll be using that a lot, too, especially if you buy an arcade-style joystick - which I cannot recommend strongly enough, especially if you have an Xbox 360. A menu will often tell you to press the A button to confirm your selection, but pressing it does nothing.Īnd I fail to see how the all-important menu that lets you reassign the buttons on your controller could have been designed to be less intuitive. The game’s menus are clunky, which gets annoying since you’re constantly going in there to tweak your button settings and check the list of special moves. ![]() It is half-assed stumbles like these that make the home version of Street Fighter IV less than perfect. It’s sad to see the polished beauty of Street Fighter IV‘s in-game graphics bookended by the cheapest of cheap 2-D animation. These add an occasionally amusing background to the proceedings, although the animation quality is Saturday-morning-cartoon-level bad. Each character has his own storyline, with animated story sequences at the beginning and end of the game. If you slog through the single-player Arcade mode, you’ll get more than just a series of matches. (We were not able to test the online connection for ourselves in the pre-release Xbox and PS3 versions of the game we played for this review.) If you don’t have a friend handy, both versions of the game support online play. That sort of solo action in a fighting game like this delivers a tiny fraction of the fun of playing against a friend. A total of 25 characters are available, although unlocking the hidden ones is a tedious exercise that involves playing against the computer by yourself for hours on end. Honda‘s flying sumo head-butts or Dhalsim‘s stretchy, yoga-enhanced limbs, you can step back into those shoes here. The cel-shaded graphics are even better in motion, and the cartoony expressions that line the characters’ faces, especially when they’re hit by devastating blows, are simultaneously heavily evocative of the previous games’ style and wholly appropriate for the high-def era.Īppropriately, the cast of 12 fighters from the classic game are all here, so whether your fond memories of 1991 involve E. This isn’t the first Street Fighter in 3-D, but it is the first that looks just like the classic games. I mean that not only in the way that it generates tension-filled moments one after another, keeping you engaged whether you’re a player or spectator.
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