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Final Fight: Streetwise Mini Review

Jon Wilcox

10/04/2006

Capcom's classic side-scroller is re-jigged for the 21st Century, but does it stay true to its roots...

Back in 1989, the yet-to-develop-Street fighter II company Capcom released Final Fight in arcades across the world. The game followed three fighters Cody, Guy, and Haggar (who also happened to be the Mayor of the city), as they tracked down and defeated the Mad Gear Gang in order to rescue Haggar's kidnapped daughter, Jessica. A side-scrolling beat-em-up that's sure to be remembered fondly by mid-twenty somethings, Final Fight was a classic of its time. In the years that have followed, the game spawned a number of home console based sequels including 1999's Final Fight Revenge on the Saturn, but after a gap of seven years, the franchise has re-emerged as Final Fight: Streetwise.

Once again set in Metro City, Streetwise follows the story of Kyle Travers, the younger brother of Cody from the original title. A pit fighter struggling to make ends meet, Kyle sets off to find his older brother after a gangster known as 'The Stiff' kidnaps him. Travelling across the grimy, shambolic, and deteriorating streets of Metro, Kyle encounters any number of gangs and louts on his way to rescuing his brother, including the addicts of a new drug, 'Glo'.

Following an open-plan approach, enabling gamers to wander around limited sized neighbourhoods each as dank and detritus filled as the last, Streetwise implements a number of side-missions as well as the main narrative thread. Despite such a layout giving an impression that the gameplay would be more non-linear, the sad fact of the matter is that Streetwise is woefully linear with gamers walking through the storyline with very little room for deviation. Each objective, duly noted in Kyle's journal (why would a street fighter write about the people he's going to beat up?), is listed down for players to hunt down in the block of city turf in which they find themselves. These 'objectives' essentially boil down into 'go to and speak to somebody' missions, and somewhat inevitably given the genre, players will find themselves in a bit of a brawl at the end of it. In the grand scheme of Streetwise being a fight-based title, that's what you'd expect, but there's no sense of creativity or imagination in the experience, with the end product dishonouring the somewhat iconic brand of Final Fight.

Superfluous to the gameplay, the side-missions range from the loosely relevant (taking part in a number of Fight Club style pit fights) to the downright bizarre (such as killing a bunch of cockroaches in a local diner) with the game also paying homage to the original title with the odd smash-a-car mini-game. None of them however add anything to the overall experience of the game, and if anything only help to show up the inadequacies of the gameplay.

Dotted throughout the city are a number of 'retailers' that Kyle can use to buy from such as the weapon selling pawn shops, health and tension restoring Liquor Stores (!), and Electrical stores for buying/unlocking new music for the soundtrack. Like the side-missions however there's no need to go to any of the stores, since health packs are frequently dropped in the course of a battle, which make the stores redundant. Neither the shops nor the side-missions bring anything to the table; they don't help to bring the city to life in any way and feel more like filler instead.

Of course the most important aspect of Final Fight: Streetwise needs to be the combat system so how well does it perform and do the series justice? Well the original title wasn't full of a catalogue of moves and attacks, but what it lacked in variety it made up for in trademarks such as Haggar's reverse piledriver. At the start of the game, Kyle has a somewhat limited range of moves; mostly a smattering punches, but thanks to his brother's old friends (Haggar and Guy) Kyle can learn further moves at the gym - including the piledriver. On the whole however the combat is unsatisfying, and quickly stifles both the experience and the name 'Final Fight'. Button-bashing in every sense of the word, making it feel very tired.

Key to a successful beat-em-up, or any game for that matter is a solid and responsive camera system. Unfortunately, Final Fight: Streetwise doesn't have one of the those, which means that on occasions players are left guessing the positions of their opponents or left to utilise the poorly responsive free camera that takes an age to manoeuvre into the correct position. In addition to the camera, the visuals themselves are boxy, uninspired, and wooden, with the actual combat animations devoid of any sense of impact leaving players feel empty and devoid of any positive experience whatsoever.

Woefully repetitive gameplay is a massively negative factor of Final Fight: Streetwise; not that we expect anything too ground-breaking from the title, it's just that the likes of Rockstar's The Warriors have helped push the beat-em-up beyond the monotonous affair that is Streetwise. Also, there's very little requirement for gamers to have any sort of concentration when they play Final Fight: Streetwise, especially when the key cause of this is the game's ability to keep the gameplay interesting.

Ordinarily a negative aspect of a game, the fact that Final Fight: Streetwise is short is in fact, a God-send, with the only real challenge to players trying to complete the game limited to how long they can keep their attention span - especially when the game is vying for that attention in direct competition to watching some lino curl.

As added 'bonuses', Studio 8 has added an Arcade mode, which plays more like the original game (and is far more fun than the actual main campaign), and the original 16-bit Final Fight. The addition of the seventeen year old title has a negative effect on more than a couple of fronts for Streetwise, not least because it shows the gap in terms of quality between the two games (one of which is undoubtedly a true arcade classic).

After playing Final Fight: Streetwise the first question you have to ask is why? Why would Capcom risk the memory of such a franchise and produce a title that almost has no right being written in the first place? Final Fight: Streetwise may have bonuses such as the original title, but when gamers can purchase that as part of a Capcom compendium it does mean that there's very little reason for players to part with their money for this. You almost have to ask whether Capcom closed Studio 8 out of sheer embarrassment...