REVIEW: Street Hero

"In XX city, Black Gang commit all manners of crimes, which controlled by Moly Brothers, the citizen hate it very much. In order to destroy it, our hero- tiger appear, depends on his excellent fight technical, he interlard Black Gang"
Street Hero opens with one of those little animated cut-scenes so beloved of Gameking titles. In this case it’s a little chibi Street fighter style character performing a hadoken at the player. While this is a less shamelessly inaccurate depiction of the actual game than the cover art (which seems to hint at some sort of medieval theme) it's also not representative of anything contained within the actual game.
Street Hero actually models itself after the sort of scrolling urban brawler perfected long ago by Double Dragon or at least a version of Double Dragon as it might appear after it had been sneezed out of an Atari 2600 and rendered in the beautiful greyscale of a Nokia 3390.
Nevertheless, the digitised music sample that plays on a permaloop (pilfered directly from the SNES RPG Lagoon!) is suitably ominous as you manoeuvre your little faceless hero along the game’s well rendered depictions of mean streets, docks and parkland, beating up other little faceless people and taking on the stereotypically larger boss at the end of each of the game’s 3 stages before being treated to a minimalist ending.
Street Hero actually models itself after the sort of scrolling urban brawler perfected long ago by Double Dragon or at least a version of Double Dragon as it might appear after it had been sneezed out of an Atari 2600 and rendered in the beautiful greyscale of a Nokia 3390.
Nevertheless, the digitised music sample that plays on a permaloop (pilfered directly from the SNES RPG Lagoon!) is suitably ominous as you manoeuvre your little faceless hero along the game’s well rendered depictions of mean streets, docks and parkland, beating up other little faceless people and taking on the stereotypically larger boss at the end of each of the game’s 3 stages before being treated to a minimalist ending.
You are equipped with two basic moves at the outset. The A button punches and the B button performs a jumping kick. Since both moves only need to connect once to knock down an opponent (3 knockdowns usually finishes them off) and the kick can hit multiple opponents at a time then the punch soon becomes redundant.
Weapons come in the form of limited throwable sai (Rafael from TMNT’s weapon of choice) that can be picked up from defeated enemies and are also activated with the punch button. Your stock of weapons can be monitored on the seperate status screen that is brought up by pausing the game, as can your health and number of remaining lives.
At the end of the stage the same boss will be waiting for you, except in the final stage where two of them emerge. Presumably these are the ‘Moly Brothers’ mentioned in the game box's only slightly racist blurb.
Street Hero manages to pull a decent enough little brawler out of the GameKing’s limited hardware. It’s graphically competent enough for the hardware and the looping tune conveys menace well, although its brevity means it won’t be hard to beat and this is perhaps why it was later repackaged, and perhaps better purchased, as part of a 4-1 multi-cart.
Score 6/10
You are equipped with two basic moves at the outset. The A button punches and the B button performs a jumping kick. Since both moves only need to connect once to knock down an opponent (3 knockdowns usually finishes them off) and the kick can hit multiple opponents at a time then the punch soon becomes redundant.
Weapons come in the form of limited throwable sai (Rafael from TMNT’s weapon of choice) that can be picked up from defeated enemies and are also activated with the punch button. Your stock of weapons can be monitored on the seperate status screen that is brought up by pausing the game, as can your health and number of remaining lives.
At the end of the stage the same boss will be waiting for you, except in the final stage where two of them emerge. Presumably these are the ‘Moly Brothers’ mentioned in the game box's only slightly racist blurb.
Street Hero manages to pull a decent enough little brawler out of the GameKing’s limited hardware. It’s graphically competent enough for the hardware and the looping tune conveys menace well, although its brevity means it won’t be hard to beat and this is perhaps why it was later repackaged, and perhaps better purchased, as part of a 4-1 multi-cart.
Score 6/10