Game Discussion of the Week: Streets of Rage 2

Added and stickied.

Streets of Rage 2 is the most overrated game in the Streets of Rage series and I would honestly say it's the second most overrated beat-em-up of all time, after all those "classic" Konami button mashers like X-Men and The Simpsons Arcade.

Outside of the music and environments, Streets of Rage 3 did absolutely everything better than Streets of Rage 2 and was by far the more ambitious game of the two. One of my biggest problems with SoR 2 is how painfully slow the gameplay is; there's no dash mechanic and all the characters humorously just causally strut through these chaotic, war-torn environments like robots. It's not just an aesthetic problem, it literally brings the game down to a crawl, to the point where I'd argue that the only playable character (for me at least) is Max since he's the only character with a dash-attack that aids in his movement speed as well as having the furthest-traveling special move in the game. This is why speedruns/TASes of the game only feature Max, because he can easily outpace all the other four playable characters despite having the slowest base movement speed. But playing as Max quickly gets tedious since you constantly have to spam dash attacks and misuse his special move just to get around. It's not fun nor as challenging as I'm making it sound.

The other problem I have with Streets of Rage 2 is the fact that the gameplay is highly inferior to Streets of Rage 3 in every regard, which is why I never feel the urge to go back and play 2, since Rage 3 made numerous additions (such as rolling/dodging and dashing) that made Streets of Rage 2 completely obsolete. And while Rage 2's soundtrack was admittedly more iconic and impressive than Rage 3's, it's not enough to keep me coming back to the game and I'd much rather just listen to the OST instead of playing it.

Despite all my bitching I'm still giving Streets of Rage 2 a 3/5 "average" score since it was a decent beat-em-up for it's time and was a significant improvement over the mediocre first SoR game. It may be grossly overrated but I don't think it's a bad game per-say.