Streets of Rage 4’s first major DLC arrives July 15, lets you whack goons with a swordfish

Streets of Rage 4's first major DLC, Mr. X's Nightmare, will launch on July 15 across Steam, GOG, and the Windows Store, and has a swish new trailer to celebrate. Most notable about this expansion is that it adds a Survival mode: endless waves of increasingly tough foes, with your fighters earning stackable perks the longer you stay alive. As can be seen above, this can lead to some ludicrous offensive potential.

There are two Survival modes: Random, which keeps each fight unpredictable through generated runs, and Weekly, a series of static gauntlets generated each week. Playing Survival will also permanently unlock new moves across the game's other modes, progression will unlock new weapons and other bonuses, and of course there are leaderboards.

The DLC also includes three new playable characters (Estel Aguirre, Max Thunder, and Shiva), more original music from Tee Lopes (Sonic Mania, League of Legends), new weapons, new enemies, and most interestingly some form of character customisation around the movesets. The latter hasn't been detailed yet, but anything that has even a slight whiff of God Hand about it has to be good.

Mr X's nightmare will cost $8/£6 when it releases July 15. Alongside this, a free update for all players will add an "in-depth" training system, colour palette options, a new Mania+ difficult level, and a bunch of refinements and tweaks based on community feedback. Finally, it looks like bringing this golden oldie back was the right move: Publisher Dotemu's press release about the DLC mentions that the game has now surpassed 2.5 million copies downloaded. That's downloaded and not sold because it's on Xbox Game Pass but, still, it certainly shows the appetite's there.

Rich is a games journalist with 15 years' experience, beginning his career on Edge magazine before working for a wide range of outlets, including Ars Technica, Eurogamer, GamesRadar+, Gamespot, the Guardian, IGN, the New Statesman, Polygon, and Vice. He was the editor of Kotaku UK, the UK arm of Kotaku, for three years before joining PC Gamer. He is the author of a Brief History of Video Games, a full history of the medium, which the Midwest Book Review described as "[a] must-read for serious minded game historians and curious video game connoisseurs alike."