Featuring hand-drawn visuals from the team behind 2017’s gorgeous Wonder Boy: The Dragon’s Trap remake, Streets of Rage 4 builds upon the classic trilogy’s gameplay with new mechanics, a fresh story and a gauntlet of dangerous stages with a serious crime problem.

Streets of Rage 4 recalls classic gameplay but it stands as an entirely original arcade-style romp thanks to the expertise of Guard Crush Games and Dotemu.

Whether players gang up with a friend or clean up the city solo, Streets of Rage 4 is a skull-bashing, chicken-chomping delight all set to a thumping soundtrack sure to get your blood pumping.

Streets of Rage 4 is the first installment to the mainline series in more than two decades and will revitalize the iconic baddie-bashing gameplay with modern touches, fresh pulsing jams, and more surprises to be revealed. The team behind Streets of Rage 4 is drawing from a lifetime of love for brawlers to introduce new fans and remind veterans alike why Streets of Rage is one of SEGA’s most beloved series.

Streets of Rage 4 is coming to PC, PS4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One as well as Xbox Game Pass on April 30, 2020 for $24.99.

The news arrived alongside a trailer revealing the first look at Streets of Rage 4’s Battle Mode, a legacy experience returning from Streets of Rage 2 and 3. This feud-settling battleground is bound to help rivals recognize who truly is Wood Oak City’s finest alley-clearing ruffian, as well as settle grudges spurred by accidental friendly strikes during multiplayer sessions. Witness just a few of the ways champions will be able to dominate their allies by viewing the above trailer.

Battle Mode lets you select your favorite characters and test your skills against one to three friends across several memorable levels. While it’s true that Streets of Rage 4 is all about cooperation, we thought it would be fun to let you guys play around with the characters and discover which of them is the most powerful, and which ones best suit your playing style. Whether you want to train your combos and specials, or just have some fun, Battle Mode is the place to do it – and it will be available right from the start.

Bringing these pixel characters back to life was no easy task, but as fans it was something we were committed to and wanted to surprise you guys with.

Everything started right at the prototyping stage of development. We didn’t have any Streets of Rage 4 characters ready then, so in order to start testing things and working on the gameplay, Jordi Asensio, our game designer, ripped some sprites from previous Streets of Rage games and integrated them into the Guard Crush engine. As the development went along, we realized that these sprites actually looked really good visually – with the lightning effects and all – and that having them playable was something we knew fans would love.

As mentioned above, bringing back all these characters wasn’t easy. First, our team had to rip each and every character, one by one, frame by frame. This was an exhausting process because we were dealing with around 1,500 different frames. But the next phase was even more complicated because we had to reconstruct all the animations with the right timings from the original games. Because of how intricate this process was, everything had to be done by hand.

Once the animations felt authentic, it was time for the real fun: the gameplay Because all the characters come from different games and because Streets of Rage 4 is a brand-new title, Jordi and the Guard Crush team had to adapt everything to the Streets of Rage 4 system. This meant going over all the characters and reproducing the properties of all their moves, one by one. This process required a lot of research and tuning, because our goal was to be very faithful. Thus, the team had to go over every timing and every hitbox, frame by frame.

Occasionally, exactly reproducing the original properties didn’t work because Streets of Rage 4 works differently from the previous episodes and the old gameplay did not feel as fun as expected. So, for some characters or moves, we had to adapt and do even more fine tuning to make their move-sets work in a way that felt fun and on-point, which also meant adding some new subtleties. I don’t want to spoil those for you here though – I’ll let you discover them on April 30!

After months of seriously hard work, voilà: 12 freshly tuned classic combatants and five new fighters, for a total of 17 playable characters!

Streets of Rage 4 reunites Axel, Blaze, and Adam for the first mainline Streets of Rage game in more than 25 years. The highly anticipated sequel embodies the classic trilogy’s gritty, neon-streaked urban atmosphere in a fully original experience boasting a strikingly fluid hand-drawn art style. New skull-cracking playable characters, expanded combat abilities, and a pulsing soundtrack from an all-star lineup including series composers Yūzō Koshiro (Streets of Rage 1, 2, & 3, Sonic the Hedgehog) and Motohiro Kawashima (Streets of Rage 2 & 3, Shinobi II) make Streets of Rage 4 an all-out brawl of a lifetime.

Streets of Rage 4 is coming to PC, PS4, Nintendo Switch, and Xbox One as well as Xbox Game Pass on April 30, 2020 for $24.99.