Super Street Fighter IV Review: Here Comes a New Challenger!

From the Vault — originally published May 12, 2010. Some links, videos or prices may be out of date.

Just a little over a year after Street Fighter IV hit consoles Capcom is back with Super Street Fighter IV their final game in the Street Fighter IV series. The decision to announce that this game would be the final game in the IV series was an interesting move considering the long history of iterative sequels in the franchise. The Street Fighter III series had three iterations with New Generation, 2nd Impact, and Third Strike. The Street Fighter II series had a whopping six iterations with The World Warrior, Champion Edition, Hyper Fighting, Super/The New Challengers, Super/Turbo, and finally Hyper which was eventually released on consoles via the Anniversary Collection.

You just bought Street Fighter IV last year so is it worth it?

Super Street Fighter IV is easily worth the release MSRP of $39 to even those with the original Street Fighter IV game. Lets face it, if you bought Street Fighter IV for $59.99 at launch you most likely have clocked in more hours in it than most games bought at the same price point. Money well spent and considering that Super Street Fighter IV is $39 and has almost 1/3 more characters than the first, balanced characters with new moves, additional stages, unlocked characters, bonus stages, a full multiplayer mode with lobbies. That’s much more content at a significantly lower price.

Big Improvements

The characters from the original game have been tweaked to provide increased balance. No more Super Sagat and his ‘S’ Tier shenanigans. Weaker characters were buffed up and overpowered ones like Sagat toned down. All characters now have two ultra combos to choose from. These things specifically improve the actual fighting gameplay quality.

Stages

The 5 additional stages (Africa eclipse, Korea, India, Skyscraper Construction aka Metro City, Crumbling Laboratory) are great and welcome additions. The Africa and Skyscraper construction stages have become two of my favorite of them all. The African eclipse stage is gorgeous and features well animated wildlife and is a great showcase of the nice lighting effects in Super Street Fighter IV. The Skyscraper construction stage consists of a crane powered moving platform that players fight on.

Characters

The 10 new charaters that have been added are all great and most importantly are viable options. It is apparent that considerable time and I am sure the experience from making the first and feedback helped when creating the new characters because they all fit in the game really well from both a design and balance standpoint. A good balance of adding Third Strike and Super Street Fighter II characters was a good move and nod to the franchise history while still adding new characters like Juri and Hakan to the mix to expand the Street Fighter Franchise. Both new characters are unique with Juri being the first Tae Kwon Do fighter in the series and Hakan with his oil sliding shenanigans.

Sound

Full custom soundtrack support finally makes it’s way to the Playstation 3 version of Super Street Fighter IV. You can now play your own music (files must already by loaded on the PS3 HDD) while battling online. In the previous version you could only play custom soundtracks while offline. Once you complete the arcade mode you can choose “arranged mode” which will replace the stage music with the re-imagined character theme music. In arranged mode the theme music for the character in the player two position will always play. This sound mode is a nice addition that brings back the classic Street Fighter nostalgia when you hear the themes of the classic characters.

Online

The online functionality has been enhanced in a big way. Though the actual netcode has not been greatly improved the random online matchmaking has been improved and seems to be noticibly better at matching players up with geographically closer opponents. The Super Street Fighter IV netcode is not the near magical netcode from say the console versions of Blazblue and certainly not GGPO status and because of this I could not in good conscience give Super Street Fighter IV a perfect score. There are other fighting games out now with better netcode and online experiences though Super Street Fighter IV is indeed a step up from the first and better than almost all other fighting games out there in terms of online functionality and performance.

Team Battles is a new mode where up to eight players can participate in 2 vs. 2, 3 vs. 3, or 4 vs. 4 team elimination battles. The Endless Battle mode allows up to eight players in a lobby where players can participate in an endless online matches where the winner stays on and plays against the next player in the lobby. Spectators can also chat with each other as they watch the match. This is huge and almost worth the price of admission alone. The lobby functionality was one of the largest requested omissions from the first Street Fighter IV game and has now become finally available.

The replay functionality from the first game has been expanded into a full replay mode. The new Replay Channel allows players to record matches from endless battle, team battle modes. Players can also download and watch replays of great matches from players around the world.

The replay mode works akin to Uncharted 2 multiplayer where the last 9 or so matches are automatically recorded and then once that number is hit they are replaced with new ones. While this makes for a functional replay mode it is not the most ideal implementation. Blazblue: Calamity Trigger has a much more user friendly replay system that asks players and spectators after each match they play or watch whether that would like to save that last match to their hard drive. The Blazblue method seems like a much more efficient way to go about it and players end up having a replay library that consists only of replays they actually wanted. With the new Super Street Fighter IV replay system players have to take the time to go though the poorly categorized replays and then choose the ones they want to keep or loose them when they are inevitably overwritten during their next play session. In Super Street Fighter IV they almost nailed it. Almost. The Super Street Fighter IV replay system is a chore to manage because the replays are not listed by Xbox Live GamerTag or PSN ID, the replays are listed by date and characters. In all the replay system could have been better with just a few simple usability additions.

Verdict

The verdict is that Super Street Fighter IV is an instant classic with few and very minor flaws. Fortunately some I mentioned such as the replay saving could hopefully get addressed in a downloadable title update. The netcode is not stellar or the best out there at this time but works well.

Online modes like lobbies that fans wanted when the first version was released are now here extending the fun factor and replayability as groups can enjoy playing and watching together for an online experience much greater than the first game offered. Super Street Fighter IV is without a doubt among the best fighting games.

It’s Street Fighter in high definition with more moves, characters, stages, online modes, replays, and even bonus stages. It’s easily worth the launch price point at $39 and is a MUST have game for any fighting game fan. Street Fighter is back, again, and it is indeed super.