Review by: Mitch Dyer

If you have any notion of Super Street Fighter IV being a half-assed cash grab, scrap it. Super improves on Street Fighter IV’s already blissful brawling, removes nearly everything that gave the community cause for concern, and adds ten new fighters to the mix. You can’t really ask for much more than that.

Super Street Fighter IV’s character select screen is notably rad. From the first moments of starting the game you can play as any character; tedious unlocking is out the window, thank goodness. What’s most exciting about that screen, however, is the addition new fighters. I still fall back on Ken and Cammy, but new characters like the oily wrestler, Hakan, and the maniacal martial artist, Juri, are excellent additions to the series. Returning characters like Street Figther III’s Ibuki and Final Fight’s Guy are also worthwhile brawlers. Crucially, each fighter is far more than a novelty – their unique level of depth and style gives them equal substance to Chun-Li or Blanka, and I’ll be playing them as regularly as I can.

Where new characters add new tricks to master, the existing roster sees a healthy dose of improvements. Most notably, each character gets another Ultra attack in addition to his or her original. This helps to give each fighter a fresher feel, and to make them slightly less predictable than before. Capcom also (mercifully) toned down Sagat’s absurd and borderline unfair power, and some of the charge characters, like Guile, can pull combos off faster. As someone who can’t count frames or track damage points in each punch, my immediate understanding of what’s changed stops there. My far-more-hardcore friends assure me that combo tweaks and damage modification completely reinvigorate the way you fight someone like Ken or M. Bison. Even for a relatively casual player like me, there are enough adjustments that even I noticed newer, better facets of the familiar fighting.

It’s clear that Capcom put a similarly deliberate effort into bolstering the online component, too. SSFIV rectifies the original’s isolated online focus by gearing it toward community. Watching replays and other players brawl is a simple way of putting players together, but the competition ramps up during the 8-player endless battles – where you and your pals “Got Next” against the previous winner. Team battle elimination matches are great too, because you cooperate independent of your teammates. It’s a one on one bout, after all, but you’re still trying to knock out the other team together.