Super Street Fighter IV Review

Not content with being an alternate costume for Zangief in SFIV, Mike Haggar appears in full-on statue form in Super. If only Boris Johnson was more like him.

Online, SFIV was solid and reliable, but somewhat fragmented by the introduction of Championship Mode. Ranked matches remain mostly unchanged, while Endless Battle replaces the player match option, allowing up to 8 friends to participate. Given the number of XBL and PSN games that allow for big teams of friends to play together, it’s a welcome and social way to beat up on friends. Team Battle supports up to 4 on 4 matches, and is a fine place to take the skills you’ve honed in Endless Battle. The Replay channel is far more fleshed out than expected, offering a host of viewing options and customisable libraries for reliving your classic encounters. The Trial mode has been overhauled, dispensing with the grinding Time Attack and Survival modes and condensing all combo trails into one 24 part epic challenge, ranging from simple to vomit-inducingly difficult.

Any fear of the 3rd Strike characters not fitting in are quickly quashed - They are perfectly realised in SFIV's world.

For all Capcom and Dimps have squeezed into the package, it’s tantamount to belligerence to find fault with Super, but the glutton in me feels it might have been nice to have a few more stages. The majority of new arenas are a massive improvement on SFIV’s rather empty environments, and at the very least they could’ve spent more time altering the older stages with new colour palettes or times of day as with previous Street Fighter upgrades. While I have no complaint with the interesting interpretations seen in the new alternate costumes, the fact that we will be once again paying for a 100kb unlock code to access content already on the disc it shipped with remains a bugbear, even if it’s an industry-wide swindle.

Sadly Dudley's rose doesn't cause damage this time around. Sadder still, there's a distinct lack of "gutter trash" quipping.

Never the less, it’s hard to give Super anything but an unreserved endorsement. For those of you that didn’t pick up vanilla SFIV, this is absolutely essential, and really, we gave the game a perfect ten – What were you waiting for? An eleven? To those who wrung the last drops of blood, sweat and tears out of SFIV, Super represents an enormous bump in content and exceptional value for money – the bargain price of £25/$40. Super is the perfectly refined poster child for an entire genre, and is once again one of the best games this generation.