Streets of Rage 2 - Gameplay

Gameplay

Though Streets of Rage 2 plays very similar to its predecessor it improves and refines much of the gameplay. The biggest change is the replacement of the original special attack, which was calling a police car to damage all on-screen enemies, with individual special attacks performed by each character, that depletes some of their health. Each character's move list has been expanded and edited to make them very individual to play instead of similar with different handicaps.

Enemies are also improved; all are given life gauges (previously only Bosses used them) and names, and like the selectable characters, given bigger and more individual movesets. There are many new enemies, including Bikers, Ninjas, Kickboxers and Robots.

There are also changes to the weapons that can be picked up. The pepper shaker and the Bottle from the original game have been removed. The knife has been tweaked, so the player can throw it at will, whereas in the first game the it could be thrown by accident by the player. As a trade-off, the knife does much less damage when thrown in Streets of Rage 2. A kunai has been added, with the same functionality as the knife. The baseball bat from Streets of Rage is replaced by a katana, which performs the most damage of any weapon in the game.

Aside from the differences in weapons and enemies, the characters themselves are given some special abilities and handicaps. In addition to their traits and individual moves, the characters now have a "semi-special move": a powerful, non-energy-draining attack, performed by double tapping a direction and pressing punch. Also, Skate had the ability to dash when a direction is double tapped, a feature carried over to all characters in Streets of Rage 3.