Ultra Street Fighter IV Review (AngeVNs)
The Street Fighter 4 series is what really got me into competitive fighting games outside of the Super Smash Bros. scene for the first time. During the vanilla Street Fighter 4 and Super Street Fighter 4 days, I mostly played casually, both online and at arcades.
When Ultra came out and finally had every character available on disc with no DLC nonsense, I started to really look back and appreciate what Street Fighter 4 did, while also noticing some of the flaws in the series.
At its core, it’s classic Street Fighter—six buttons, neutral-heavy gameplay, different character archetypes, all that good stuff. The main gimmicks of SF4 are kind of hit-or-miss for me, though. The Focus Attack is a fair and balanced way to deal with projectiles, and honestly, it’s better than how SF5 and SF6 handle anti-projectile mechanics. That said, having Ultras separate from Supers feels like a mistake. It leads to spammy gameplay. I get that Ultras are supposed to be comeback mechanics, but after playing SF5 and SF6, I feel like characters having multiple Supers just flows better.
For better or worse, this was the last Street Fighter game to have a more traditional arcade mode for telling character stories. Sure, it’s kind of limited—only two or three cutscenes per character—but looking back, it’s refreshing to have that classic console fighting game story experience all wrapped up in one package for every character. Especially when you consider how hit-or-miss the story and arcade modes have been in SF5 and SF6.
One thing I’ve been messing around with more is Ultra Street Fighter 4’s Omega Mode. I already thought the ability to play characters based on specific patches—vanilla SF4, Super, and Ultra—was a cool feature, but Omega Mode takes it further. It feels like a test bed for what they could get away with in SF5, and it’s fun. Especially considering how SF5 phased out invincible reversals, I’ve come to appreciate Omega Mode as a way to still enjoy fun gimmicks without losing core mechanics like uppercuts or DPs, which are a huge part of Street Fighter characters.
Overall, it’s a shame that Ultra Street Fighter 4 doesn’t have rollback netcode, especially since basically every other mainline entry does now. But it’s still one of the most content-rich Street Fighter games (without DLC) ever. It stays true to the traditional formula while sprinkling in just a few gimmicks—unlike SF5 and SF6, which feel like they’ve gone off the rails by changing so much about major characters and leaning hard into the modern rushdown-only meta.