Streets of Rage 4

Alternate moves can be unlocked in Survival Mode. The further you get, the more XP you receive towards unlocking new moves. Your overall score doesn't mean anything regarding this achievement. Your progress is based upon how many waves you clear in one sitting. That's really all there is to this achievement.

Having said that...this is going to be a pretty long grind. You need to unlock all alternate moves for ALL characters. This includes the SOR1/2/3 versions, and Roo as well (the unlockable kangaroo character ), who counts as an SOR3 character. There's 5 new moves per modern day characters, 4 moves per SOR 2 and 3 characters (Roo is the exception, he has 5 moves), and 1 per SOR 1 characters. 84 moves total. That's the bad news.

The good news is that if you play this game in co-op, progress counts for BOTH characters being used during that session. So it would be in your best interests to find a partner and play together to cut the requirements in half. However, even when playing with someone else, be prepared to play an absolute ton of Survival Mode. It usually takes about 25-30 minutes to get to Wave 20, and that's about enough to unlock one and a half moves.

EDIT: it has come to my attention that, while you will make progress towards two characters if you play in co-op, the XP is actually split between the two characters. For example, you can potentially unlock all five moves for a fresh character going to wave 34 solo, but getting the same amount of progress for two characters in co-op would require you to get to wave 42-44, which is incredibly difficult. So it's up to you how you want to tackle this.

I would like to share some tips to make the Survival grind easier. The progress you make toward unlocking each character's moves is determined by the wave you reach, but I am unsure of the exact formula. I noticed that the progress box fills up more slowly for each character's later moves. You will be aiming to reach as high a wave as possible on each run to maximise the progress toward unlocking each move. Here are my specific tips.

Firstly, I used blitz spam () as my preferred strategy with most of the characters. SOR2, 3 and 4 characters have blitz moves. The SOR1 characters don't have blitz moves, so you'll just have to do regular attacks with them. The SOR2, 3 and 4 characters all have alternate blitz move as their first move that can be unlocked. For the majority of the characters, their alternate blitz is better than their default blitz, and you should switch to the alternate blitz as soon as possible. I did not use specials as they cost health, which is simply too much of an impediment in Survival mode in my opinion. You can recover the lost health from hitting enemies, but if you get hit before you can re-fill the green segment of the health bar, you lose the health. I strongly suggest playing in Weekly Sim mode as you will at least know what enemies you'll be facing in each wave. The perks you can choose after each wave are pre-determined. The perks I recommend are the following:

Ground Level (increases damage dealt by 15%, reduces damage taken by 15%, increases move speed by 15%, but you can not jump). This is a great perk. The damage bonuses more than compensate for the inability to jump. I would take this over any other perk as soon as it's available.

Damage Up (increases damage dealt by 10%). The more damage you can deal, the faster you can kill enemies. This is a great perk for all characters.

Damage Reduction (reduces damage taken by 10%). Self-explanatory. This can make the difference between taking a hit that kills you or leaves you alive with a sliver of health.

Toxic Blitz, Fire Blitz, Electric Blitz. These add Poison, Fire and Electric damage to your blitz attacks. They also stack with each other. Poison is the best, but the others are decent as well. The damage bonus also increases if you pick up the same perk in later waves.

Gold Weapon. This gives you a golden weapon that does significantly increased damage compared to the normal variant of the weapon. There is a gold knife, gold pipe, gold boomerang and a gold halberd. These weapons are all very strong, especially when combined with elemental weapon perks.

Toxic Weapon, Fire Weapon, Electric Weapon. These add elemental effects to your weapon attacks. Very useful with all weapons, but especially so when combined with gold weapons, which can destroy bosses in a few hits.

Increased Weapon Durability. Increases weapon durability by 20%. This can appear more than once and it will stack if you already have the perk. The durability will increase to 40%, then 60%, etc.

There is a perk that upgrades your star move so that it launches rockets. It starts off with 4 rockets, then if you choose the same perk later, it upgrades it to 8 rockets, then 12 and so on. This is good for all characters as the rockets do a ton of damage over a wide area, in addition to the damage from the star move itself.

The other perks are a matter of preference, but I would definitely avoid Glass Cannon, which increases your damage dealt by 100% but also increases your damage taken by 100%. There is also Random Upgrade, which gives you a random perk. This can be a double-edged sword. You might get a great perk like Damage Up or something useless like Glass Cannon.

Try to save gold weapons for bosses and tougher enemies. You can drop weapons on the floor to preserve them, however be careful doing this when there are Donovans and Galsias (or their variants) around, as they can and will pick up your weapons and use them against you. There are also some non-gold weapons that are very strong, such as the giant swords that Zeebos use.

For stages that have stage hazards such as the boxing ring, you can use the hazards to do a lot of the work for you. You can also throw enemies out of the ring when the electric barriers are down. Be careful though, as getting knocked off the edge yourself takes out a large chunk of your health.

It took me a total of 68 runs to unlock all the moves. Each run took between 20 to 30 minutes depending on what wave I reached. Some characters are much stronger than others and you can breeze through waves with them, like SOR4 Shiva, SOR3 Shiva and Cherry. My highest wave reached was 33, however that was a one-off run with Cherry, whose alternate blitz is very overpowered. Most of my runs ended between wave 18 to 20. The difficulty starts to increase dramatically from around wave 21. I added up the time taken for each of my runs and the total was around 20 hours. This will take a while. I turned off the in-game music and played my own music, or listened to podcasts on Spotify to help make the grind more tolerable.