Let’s get one thing straight, right now. This is not Final Fight. The classic scrolling fighter that we all know and love is a colourful, fun and exhilarating romp through a cartoon underworld in which you must pummel your way from regular street thug to OTT crime lord. It’s violent but it also has a sense of humour and it has a soul. Final Fight Streetwise, on the other hand, is just violence minus the fun. Yes, the street fighting is there and the familiar characters all put in an appearance but the entire game has been draped in a shroud, of “urban gangster something-or-other”, so thick that all of the game’s positive aspects are rendered ineffectual.
The 3D roaming fisticuffs that Capcom Studio 8 has built into Final Fight Streetwise is fairly adequate. You have light and strong attacks that can be combined to varying results and a selection of special moves that can be bought or learnt from different dojos along the way. It’s not incredibly sophisticated, like Devil May Cry 3 for example, but it gets the job done and helps create one of the few scrolling beat-em-ups that actually works in three dimensions. The camera can sometimes lose track of the action but, aside from that, the combat is solid enough to make the pure fighting sections reasonably enjoyable. Which would have been enough if Capcom had used the engine to deliver a 3D brawler that had remained faithful to its predecessors.
It couldn’t do that though, could it? It had to make it “streetwise”, which, in real terms, means everything happens at night, someone has to swear at least once every five seconds, only gangster rap and death metal must feature on the soundtrack AND the main character must be able to use a gun! Okay, so there have been plenty to of scrolling fighters to use firearms but this is a direct sequel to a classic game that shunned gunplay of all kinds. Cody, Guy and Haggar were stereotypical heroes, like digital Bruce Lees, who didn’t need to use guns because they were the good guys. They were better than that.
Kyle, the “hero” of Final Fight Streetwise, isn’t better than that. He can use pistols and shotguns wherever he finds them lying around (lord knows who keeps misplacing all those weapons) and has no qualms about randomly kicking the hell out of a sleeping tramp or an old lady. That’s right - in the god-awful free roaming parts of Metro City you can approach any citizen and knife them to death even if they’re completely innocent. This results in the loss of a few “respect points’, which don’t seem to carry much consequence other than altering the way in which NPCs respond to your presence - a feature that is so badly implemented that, when SPOnG attempted to kill as many innocents as possible, the only change was that a few men offered to take us shopping for clothes....oh, how we wish we were joking.
