About ten years ago, the joke was that Capcom had trouble counting to three. Then Street Fighter III came out and while it maintains an active tournament community to this day, it has largely fallen by the wayside. Now Street Fighter IV is here, and it merges some of the best ideas of the previous games to make a pretty fun take on the series while adding a few new characters. For those not familiar with Street Fighter, the basic idea is that you pick one of several characters, each with their own advantages, and pit them against another character on a 2D sidescrolling field. They kick, punch, and anime-fireball one another until one of them goes down. It sounds simple, but the series has a surprising amount of depth.

The most obvious updates in this game are the graphics and about seven new characters. It’s now a 3D game visually, though the gameplay is still on a 2D plane which means your movement is mostly limited to walking, dashing, and jumping in various forms, with no side-stepping.  A few characters can teleport, roll, or jump off of walls, but it’s fairly linear otherwise. In terms of speed and general flow, this is like Street Fighter 2 with a few good lessons learned from SF3. You have SF3’s throwing system (including ’kara throws’ for some characters), a super meter which can be used for a single big attack or several ’EX’ special moves (for example, making Ryu’s fireball a two-hit attack instead of its normal one hit), and Focus Attacks which reward for predicting your opponent’s moves. There’s also a Revenge Gauge, used to fuel your Ultra move; the more damage you have taken when you use your Ultra, the more damage you do in return.