STREETS OF KAMUROCHO
Original Release: Sega, 2020, PC
A little promotional snack of a game that inserts Yakuza characters and music into (a small part of) Streets of Rage 2
Streets of Kamurocho (PC, Sega, 2020)
Where to Buy: Freeware, see Links section below
Review by: C. M0use
Streets of Kamurocho is an odd promotional freebie from Sega released to celebrate the company's 60-year anniversary; it was only available via Steam for a few days in mid-October 2020, though people have since decoupled it from the service and you can find a standalone executable version floating around. If you grabbed it in your Steam account during the promotional period it remains available indefinitely, but if you didn't, Sega has yet to make it available again.
It's pretty much a ROM hack of Streets of Rage 2, and only the first level at that. It's an odd mishmosh that focuses primarily on replacing the player and enemy sprites, with only sporadic touches beyond that: some extra layering of Yakuza stuff over the original level, some new weapons, and a new piece of music for each character you select. The other new touch is a leaderboard that players can post their high scores to, though I have no idea if this works outside of Steam.
The game just loops the first level endlessly, seemingly getting a little tougher each time. You can pick from Kazuma or Goro to start out, and then Ichiban becomes available once you've completed the loop at least one time. Though there's a lot of new sprite work for both the players and enemies, all of the playables seem to share Axel's move set. It also uses all of the original game's sound effects.
Anyway, unless you're a huge Yakuza fan it probably isn't worth going out of your way for. It plays just like Streets of Rage 2, but you just get the first level ... it's more a novelty than a real original game experience. It also didn't autodetect my gamepad, which is an off-brand but a good one and like 95% of games pick it up.
Links
- Reportedly you can still download this on a PC while logged into Steam by opening steam://install/1368430 in a browser
- Also a standalone version available via the Internet Archive
WIP to expand the game using Streets of Rage Remake
Videos
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