Maker - Sega   Catalogue No. - G-4116

Type - Scrolling Beat'em

The final in the Bare Knuckle series better known as Streets of Rage in the west.  Two of our main characters are back, Blaze and Alex joined by two new cheap arse characters.  There's Sammy the younger brother of Axle who has been taken hostage and Zan, some old fart that's half cyborg.  Anyway, many people regard this as the best in the trilogy.  Personally I don't think so.  Let me tell you why.

First off is the gameplay.  Bare Knuckle III is a lot faster than the 2nd game and of course 1st game.  There are also a lot more moves plus new animation frames for the older moves.  Sega have also seemed to have sorted out that annoying problem of getting stuck in and endless loop of picking up one weapon over another whenever two weapons were placed near each other.  Weapons also have a use meter now limiting them to the amount of times you can use them rather than the weapon disappearing after you had dropped it a few times.  Levels are placed together a little odd I find with quite a few "mini" sections linking two completely unrelated areas together.  Over all I'd say this is a much better game as far as play mechanics are concerned, however that's where the improvements stop.

I find the graphics in Bare Knuckle III very grainy just like a lot of later Mega Drive games.  There's no real decent use of art in the game.  Most of the shading is done by placing a mesh type pattern of colour over stuff rather than actually drawing in properly.  The character profile pictures look crap as well.  Axel looks more like a monkey man than a tough guy.  The audio is also bloody awful for the most part.  God knows what Yuzo Koshiro was thinking when he came up with the soundtrack to Bare Knuckle III.  Even the best tunes on this game are worse than the worse tunes in Bare Knuckle II.  Quite a few times it's just noise rather than music.  Even the speech seems worse.

If you had to buy only 1 Bare Knuckle game I'd opt for the 2nd game any day over this one.  I can live with the grainy backgrounds but that music just annoyed me most of the time.