Streets of Rage (Game Gear)

The "Streets of Rage" series is one of the seminal Mega Drive series though it also spawned ports for the Sega Master System and the Sega Game Gear. In fact the first 2 games of the series were both ported to the Master System and Game Gear. It's the Game Gear version that is by far the most different from the original Mega Drive game.

Streets of Rage, like Golden Axe (and many other games of the era) was a side scrolling beat 'em up where the players had to get from A to B beating up punks along the way. Each of the levels featured a boss and by beating the boss the player could progress to the next level. The series was well known for a fine balance of difficulty, a good selection of enemies, weapons and levels which helped it to create a huge fans base, but how does this Game Gear version really do?

The first, rather noticeable difference between the Mega Drive version and this version is at the character selection screen. On the Mega Drive you had 3 available players (Adam Hunter, Axel Stone and Blaze Fielding) for the Game Gear version however Adam has been dropped (mainly due to the size of the Game Gear cartridges). You will also notice that the "Specials" (a cop car that fires on the enemy) are heavily altered in this version of the game making it much tougher. Though the key gameplay difference (and by far the most noticeable) is the lack of a "knee" animation making front holds almost useless (this really makes the game more difficult).

Despite being a more difficult game than it's Mega Drive and Master System siblings it's a much shorter game with just 5 levels which are all altered (shortened) versions of levels from the other games (completely dropping level 2,3 and 7 from the original game). Whilst this "should" make the game easier the big issue is the lack of "kneeing" which takes a lot of the strategy out of the game and makes it a lot more frustrating than it needs to be.

Whilst graphically it is impressive for a Game Gear game it is also the weakest in terms of playability of any of the Streets of Rage games, which is perhaps the best way to think of it. Whilst is is somewhat true to the original it's certainly not up there with full console versions of the game and I think that is probably the key. If you are a hardcore Streets of Rage fan this is probably worth a play through but for everyone else you can give it a miss and just get the much better Mega Drive version.

67%

Details:
Console-Game Gear
Release-1992
Developer-Sega
Genre-Beat em up
Players-1 or 2


Trivia:
This is the only version of the game with a cheat menu (see the bottom picture) to access this you need to go to the options menu and select song "11" from the sound test. Press the 1 and 2 buttons together and you should get the options to select start stage (1-5) and turn off damage (making the player invincible to damage from enemies).