I generally avoid playing bad games, but I actually had the displeasure of completing this one.

The first problem you will encounter is that every button does the same thing. You'll put on a suit and you'll realize that you can only do one thing with each costume, and that a lot of the suits do the same thing. Some of these costumes could have easily been mixed together to have multiple actions or have an upgrade path instead. That isn't even the worst part of the game.

The worst part is easily the dumbass Balan Bouts where you watch a cutscene and press a button at the correct time in succession. These are required to get all the collectables in the game and if you miss the perfect timing window even once, you have to complete the level and try again. Actually, I'm pretty sure you have to beat the boss to reset the chapter in order to do it again. There are 48 of these painful events in the game and you will find that you would rather go out and lay in the street than do one of those again.

This might be the worst game I have ever played and the only way I can recommend that someone even touch this game is if it is available for free, whether it is given to you by a poor soul who wanted to rid themselves of such a burden or available through a subscription like Game Pass/PS Plus. This game was $60 at launch and thankfully someone at Square Enix had a brain and decided to permanently lower it to $40. That is still way too much and they should be ashamed for asking for any amount of money for this. Do everyone a favor and make it free permanently so that people can play it for five minutes or challenge themselves to 100% it.

While undeniably a pioneer of the genre, the original Streets of Rage is kind of hard to go back to. For the most I had no real problems with the game with the combat against regular enemies being pretty fun. I found it satisfying to memorize each enemies specific quirk and utilize that to dominate the levels.

My major complaint comes from the games atrocious bosses. For certain bosses I found no clear way to continuously attack them without using the limited special moves. The strategy for some fights, especially the Mona and Lisa fight, was to die and use my special attack to wipe out the boss. This strategy failed me in the last level since your now allowed to use special attacks. As a result I wasn't even able to beat the game.

Its still worth a try if your curious and it would probably be a lot better with a buddy to play with. As it stands, this is the weakest main entry in the series which means it can only get better from here.

is there literally anything to say here. does anyone really care what i have to say about a 2002 licensed collectathon featuring Taz The Tazmanian Devil. does anyone really fucking care.

if you do, this game fucking sucks. the camera is awful and gives me a headache, platforming is just miserable because you have such awful control of your momentum in air, and the fucking noise pollution this game creates is just grating. remember how, in arkham asylum, the joker would comment on the shit you were doing and it'd usually be contextual and related to wherever you were or what you were doing? imagine that but with absolutely no specificity and yosemite fucking sam's shrill voice every five seconds. i personally love hearing literally only like 8 different voice clips (such as "YOU'RE A DRIVIN' UP MY BLOOD PRESSURE", "OOOOOOH YOU'RE AS BAD AS THAT PESKY RABBIT" and "STOP THAT YA... YA... YA CRITTER!") every time i spin anything in this game.

it's really a shame, because i almost like some of the level design and goals in this game? every stage has relatively creative presentations for "destroy this image of taz", with my favorite being "swiffer this floor until the image is gone", but it just cannot save a dead gameplay engine. even for 2002, this is fucking bad. enemies, like in hitman, have two modes: one, complete and utter obliviousness and two, psycho mantis when you're plugged into player one's slot. the only way you can get rid of guards is fucking tedious and wildly inconsistent, and some enemies you just flat out cannot even remove from the level, making exploration that much more tedious when you're going through with a fine-tooth comb for 100%.

i cannot say enough bad things about this game. this actively gave me headaches every time i sat down to play it. i have not even touched on the boss fights and literally all i'm going to do is link one of them and leave it at that (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G2C6uXVuK0E). my advice for you as someone who enjoyed this as a child is that your nostalgia is lying to you. this controls worse than you remember. this sounds worse than you remember. this is less fun than you remember. leave your positive memory of this untouched and pristine, because that's all it can ever be.