STREET WARRIOR
Original Release: Phoenix Games, 2007, PlayStation 2
A simplistic budget beat-em-up with almost no redeeming qualities
Street Warrior (PS2, Phoenix Games, 2007)
Where to Buy: eBay
How to Emulate: PlayStation 2 Emulation Guide
Review by: C. M0use
This is my second encounter with Dutch shovelware outfit Phoenix Games (the first was over at Golden Quarter), who appeared to be a Western parallel of D3 Publisher in basically just flinging out cheaply-made titles at budget prices in all sorts of genres for the PS1 and PS2. But while D3 would often put at least a little elbow grease in and come up with a creative idea or two, I'm getting the sense this company just had their games made by a kid with one year of game development school under their belt and little particular talent.
Street Warrior is a clumsy beat-em-up that starts out by having you pick from a selection of what look like five ghetto goombas, or a random cowboy/pimp. But as the between-level narration soon tells us (which sounds like it was written by the Japanese heart surgeon from The Office), they're actually a special police unit tasked to take down a crime gang by taking their shirts off and punching it out in the streets.
And no matter which character you pick, you'll be called "Bulldog" and have the same move set. A couple slow punches, a slow kick, and two throws. One of those throws is a nasty-looking piledriver, which is probably the best bit of the game. But all the enemies can throw too and often do it right back to you.
Every level is just a big one-screen arena, and you only fight two guys at a time. But that's plenty of challenge given how slow and stiff you move. As it turns out you'll need to spam certain moves to keep the second guy from just cheapshotting and wrecking you constantly, I found doing the throw as often as possible (possibly set up by a quick hook for uncooperative foes) was the best bet as you're invincible during its frames of animation.
So you basically just spam the same moves against the same limited set of enemies over and over and over. The only variety is that occasionally a wubbly sound notifies you that a power-up has appeared somewhere in the arena, and you can do a casual jog around comically (with the enemies trotting after you) to look for it. This is sometimes necessary to pick up health boosts as you get only a limited set of 7 or so lives to complete the whole game (10 levels total), no continues, but you can also get pills that speed up your attacks or body armor that deflects damage for a short while.
The whole mess is accompanied by European dance music that I guess was going for a Streets of Rage vibe, but they landed on "porn soundtrack" or maybe "casino commercial" instead. There's nothing to enjoy here, this is one to completely ignore.
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