After sitting on the shelf for three decades, the Streets of Rage franchise is finally getting a new entry, and DotEmu has announced that its beat-em-up sequel has a release date. Streets of Rage 4 will be available on PC, Xbox One, PS4 and Switch beginning April 30th for $24.99.

Along with a release date, a new trailer shows off Battle Mode, a feature that returns from the 2nd and 3rd games in the series where players can beat up on each other instead of just a stream of AI-controlled enemies. Streets of Rage 4 supports two-player online multiplayer, or four players locally. DotEmu has stepped up from simply porting and remaking retro games like Wonder Boy III to creating new experiences from scratch, and judging by our Gamescom demo last fall, it is ready to deliver an experience worthy of the series.

Even in its darkest years, though, Sega made some good calls. Intelligent mid-2000s acquisitions like Creative Assembly (Total War) and Sports Interactive (Football Manager) were joined in the ’10s by Relic Entertainment (Warhammer 40,000) and Amplitude Studios (Endless Space) to form a strong division in “Sega West.” This policy seems to be continuing: Sega recently acquired Two Point, the team behind Two Point Hospital.

Sega has, of course, seen success beyond these acquisitions. Subsidiary Atlus has surged in popularity: its Shin Megami Tensei spin-off series Persona is now arguably Sega’s strongest non-hedgehog property. RGG division’s Yakuza also goes from strength to strength, with the seventh entry in the series due to be announced next week.

This resurgence, though, has been driven almost entirely by new projects, new divisions and new subsidiaries. Sonic Team, once the crown jewel of Sega, has produced many middling-to-poor Sonic games and not a great deal else. AM2, the company’s most-storied division, has moved from defining genres with games like OutRun, Virtua Fighter, Virtua Cop, Sega Rally and Shenmue to mostly pushing out (admittedly excellent) Project Diva rhythm games and Japan-only free-to-play titles. The successes of today are disconnected from those of its past.

Recently, there are clear attempts to change that.

The decision to allow Christian Whitehead, a prominent member of the Sonic community, to create an official game in Sonic Mania proved astute. The title was released in 2017, within a few months of Sonic Team’s Forces, and surpassed the in-house game both critically and, according to unofficial figures, commercially. Mania represented an embrace of the old way — Whitehead’s Retro Engine was built to recreate the feel of the original Genesis games.

The success of Sonic Mania clearly woke someone up at Sega. Its current slate contains the expected entrants in ongoing series like Yakuza, Puyo Puyo, Total War, Football Manager and Mario & Sonic at the Olympics. But we’ve also seen some “old Sega” working its way back into the fold. Take Streets of Rage 4, a faithful continuation of Sega’s Genesis series that’s being developed and published by a third-party. As with Sonic Mania, this new Streets of Rage game is underpinned by an engine essentially built to evoke the originals.

Sega’s history clearly doesn’t begin and end with the Genesis. Panzer Dragoon: Remake, a return for a Sega Saturn classic, is being handled by Polish company Forever Entertainment. Even the Dreamcast is getting some love: Space Channel 5 VR: Kinda Funky News Flash! is not only the best-named game of the year, it’s a virtual-reality return for a game that represents Sega at the peak of its late-’90s weirdness. (Okay, perhaps Seaman is the peak, but SC5 is not far off.)

Then there’s Super Monkey Ball: Banana Blitz HD. The original Super Monkey Ball was made for NAOMI, the Dreamcast-derived arcade platform. Due to the death of Sega’s console, it ended up as a GameCube launch title, becoming Sega’s first ever game on a Nintendo machine. Much like Sonic, though, the series has since meandered. The direct sequel was solid, but Adventure, Banana Blitz, Step & Roll and Banana Splitz — there have been a lot of Super Monkey Ball games — not so much.

Banana Blitz HD is an attempt to bring the series back. The remaster is being developed in-house at Sega, and does away with the main issue with the original — the Wii’s motion controls. Along with updated graphics, the HD version has a bunch of modern-day features like online leaderboards and quick restarts for speedrunners, along with a separate multiplayer-focused section for party games.

Perhaps the best example of Sega’s renewed interest in its past is the upcoming Genesis Mini. After years of licensing terrible third-party hardware running bad emulators, Sega is producing its own microconsole, and it’s doing it properly. The Mini is being brought to life by members of the original hardware team, and the game selection is varied, including many cult titles like Dynamite Headdy alongside the expected big hitters. Sega has called on long-time partner M2 to handle the game ports, and even brought in composer Yuzo Koshiro, who scored Streets of Rage, to create new music for the system’s menu.

Taking all of these things as a whole, it’s clear something has shifted within Sega. The company spent two decades just surviving. Between reviving its own IPs and recognizing when other companies can do better, it’s now seemingly found the formula to exist while rediscovering its roots.

The gameplay teaser that followed half a year later showed a 2D game that seemed to play like the originals, but the art style still didn’t seem “right.” Why is the art such a massive departure? Would the game feel as direct and satisfying to play? Those were the kind of questions I was (silently, unlike many fans on social media) asking myself.

Then came the musicians. Last month, the game’s publisher Dotemu announced that Motohiro Kawashima and Yuzo Koshiro, whose contributions to the original soundtracks are legendary, were on board, joined by Hedeki Naganuma (Jet Set Radio), Keji Yamagishi (Ninja Gaiden) and Yoko Shimomura, who’s most famous for the Kingdom Hearts series (before that she had worked on music for Final Fight, Street Fighter II, Legend of Mana and many others). To call it an all-star group would be an understatement. At the very least, then, this game would sound great.

So, I came to my 30-minute demo at Gamescom with some trepidation. In all honesty, I expected to hear some great music scoring an underwhelming tribute to a long-dead game series. I was wrong. Streets of Rage 4 plays, and looks, like a dream.

The game is being developed by three studios: Lizardcube, who brought Wonder Boy back to life in 2017 with The Dragon’s Trap, is doing the artwork; Guard Crush Games, responsible for the hilariously good XBLA beat-’em-up Streets of Fury is lending its engine and handling the programming; publisher Dotemu is assisting in game design and, naturally, publishing.

It took just a few seconds playing Streets of Rage 4 for me to understand how much love has gone into this game. The characters are hand-drawn, but precise, mirroring the feel of the original pixel art, and everything is richly animated. It still has that saturday-morning-cartoon feel, but with a frame rate 12 times higher. That’s a style that publisher Dotemu seems enamored with: the Wonder Boy remake Lizardcube worked on is understandably comparable, and Windjammers 2 similarly supplants decades-old pixel art with sharp hand-drawn lines.

Then there’s the background art. While the classic Streets of Rage games had gorgeous, but fairly static backdrops, 4‘s stages are teeming with life. In the level I played, there were people eating at roadside bars, flies swirling around trash, pots boiling on stoves, cherry blossoms falling on wet paving that reflected the city behind — it’s really quite breathtaking when you stop and admire the scenery. Not that there’s much time for that.

Streets of Rage 4 fills your screen with multiple foes to kick, punch and throw aside. It follows the formula of the originals, introducing new enemies as solo threats before adding them to the pool of characters you’ll face off against in huge brawls. This gives you a little breathing room to learn each opponent’s patterns and quirks, and ensures a continually increasing difficulty level through the game.

The controls will be familiar to veterans, and easy to pick up for newcomers. You could feasibly play this game with a Genesis controller: There’s an attack button, a jump button, a ‘special attack’ button and that’s it. Specials are, as in 2 and 3, more like moves in Street Fighter than the original game’s screen-clearing cop car. Rather than arbitrarily limit how often you can do a special, the moves take away some of your health, which can be replenished with regular attacks until you get hit. There’s also a leaping special, which can be pulled off, appropriately, by pressing jump and special at the same time.

Streets of Rage 4 feels tight. The controls are responsive, there’s a sufficient weight to attacks and the same patterns and techniques I used decades ago worked as expected. The special system is nicely balanced, encouraging you to risk your health in the hope that you can evade hits until you regain life. There are also some environmental hazards, like electricity, acid and fire, which should add some variety and strategy to fights. There’s no throwing out the rule book here, just little tweaks and changes, as you’d expect from a sequel.

At present there are three playable characters, although that could increase before the game’s eventual launch. Series mainstays Axel and Blaze are joined by a new character named Cherry. She’s the daughter of Adam Hunter, who was the final playable character from the original game, and had cameos in later games. Cherry plays a bit like Skate from the second game (which tracks, as he’s her uncle) and is faster-but-weaker than the lumbering Axel. She also has a guitar on her back and one of her specials is using it like Pete Townshend on an unsuspecting enemy. I’m already a fan.

Ironically, the one thing I expected to love about Streets of Rage 4 wasn’t there. I could barely make out the music because publisher Dotemu’s booth at Gamescom was far louder than the tiny speakers connected to the TV. Thankfully IGN has uploaded some gameplay from the level I played, and while there’s still some work to be done with character voices and foley, I like where it’s going. There’s also a new Motohiro Kawashima track on Dotemu’s Bandcamp that sounds as wild as anything he created for the old games:

So, yeah, against all odds, Streets of Rage 4 has won me over in record time. While the developers haven’t announced when the game will arrive, we do know that it’ll be available on all the expected platforms: PlayStation, Xbox, Switch and PC. I imagine Dotemu will continue to trickle out information on characters, enemies, music and the like over the coming weeks and months before announcing the release date and pricing.

They’re not the only prominent names involved, either. You can also expect original music from Jet Set Radio‘s Hideki Naganuma, Kingdom Hearts‘ Yoko Shimomura and Ninja Gaiden‘s Keiji Yamagishi. It’s uncertain just to what degree they’ll be involved. All the same, it’s comforting to know that the fourth Streets of Rage installment will pay respect to its predecessors beyond the basic gameplay concept of punching and kicking your way to victory.