If you're new to fighting games, play Street Fighter 6. If you've been playing fighting titles since the original release of Street Fighter in 1987, play Street Fighter 6. While not perfect, it does so much right. From the gameplay, story, and sound, to explanations, accessibility, and cross-play, for those who are willing to learn and want to try their hand at fighting games, there's no better place to start than with Street Fighter 6.
With this newest iteration, Street Fighter has made a significant effort to introduce new players to its world and simplify the gameplay. In a similar fashion to its two previous incarnations, Street Fighter 6 features combo trails for each of the 18 characters featured. However, also included is a tutorial that covers universal systems in the game, as well as character guides for each of the cast members, with write-ups and explanations on how each individual attack works and why you would want to use it. It's absolutely amazing that these concepts are made available in a way that's easy to follow and try out in a controlled environment.
In addition to all the information being made available to players, Street Fighter 6 also uses a new control type to further ease players into the game. Modern controls, which are very different from the usual classic set-up, are enabled by default. With the modern control type, special attacks can be done with much simpler commands, and through the use of a combo button players can easily perform combos.
While it's true that when most titles implement features to help newcomers, they're usually exploited by veterans to widen the skill gap, here the game plays similarly to Marvel vs. Capcom 3, in that you have light, medium, and heavy attack buttons. What this means is that you'll simply not have access to some normal attacks, depending on the character.
Just in case all of this wasn't enough to entice newer players into trying Street Fighter 6, a side game called World Tour has been added. World Tour itself is an over-the-shoulder, third-person action RPG, where you create a custom character and complete objectives for NPCs, and explore to find items. While it's a good addition to the series, it just barely passes as “OK” and is a couple of strikes away from being “Meh.”
One of the problems with World Tour mode is the visuals. It takes an extremely long time for the high-resolution versions of textures to display, for example, so often the game will have a muddy, pixelated look to it that's reminiscent of PlayStation 3-era releases (it gave me flashbacks of playing through the Uncharted 3 online multiplayer one final time before the servers shut down). Not only are the textures an issue, but framerates will often dig down into the 40s. If there are a lot of NPCs in the area or massive landmarks such as buildings that need to be loaded then the experience suffers. It's as if there's some kind of data-streaming issue within World Tour itself.
There are some good ideas here though. I appreciate the idea of having NPCs crowd around to watch fights. However, I really don't want them around if they're chugging the frame rate. There's an option on PC to set World Tour to 30fps, but I would rather lower the graphical settings. Seeing what it looked like though, I refused to believe that my computer should be struggling to the degree that it was, so after about 20 hours or so I finally got fed-up enough to investigate, and it turns out that my CPU had been running in eco mode. While changing this did significantly improve my experience, the game does still have its dips, but at least it no longer hovers around the 55fps mark.
Performance issues aside, how does the rest of World Tour mode play? Well, you'll be encouraged to play cheaply and grind for hours. As this mode is strictly a solo-player experience, all matches are against AI-controlled enemies. As AI-controlled enemies have been known to do since early fighting game history, expect all of your buttons to be read, with an additional crux of the damage ratio being 1-10 in favor of the AI. Come prepared with Velveeta, sharp cheddar, and deli-sliced Colby-Jack, because you're going to need plenty of cheese for these matches.
As you complete character objectives, you'll unlock new travel areas, and meet up with the main cast. For each of the main characters that you meet, you can become their student and add new attacks to your custom character. This can make things significantly easier, although some attacks are just naturally better at spamming against the AI than others.
The best way to sum up World Tour mode would be that it's similar to Shenmue or the Yakuza series. And even though it's not the most fun and has a myriad of issues, it throws enough rewards at you to keep you invested. You'll collect clothing items and new abilities for your custom character, as well as unlock new costumes for the main cast.
It's a shame that the character dialog is poorly crafted. While the performances of the acting talent are good, the script itself feels as though it was written by a nine-year-old. It's very jarring to hear any of the characters speak and it almost always pulls me out of any immersion.
In major contrast, Street Fighter 6's main draw - Fighting Ground - is amazing. All of your standard fighting game modes are available in Fighting Ground, from Training to Local Versus and Online modes, as well as a standard, arcade-style Story mode, which focuses on the main cast. While this is the one area of the game your avatar character isn't available, you are able to use any of the costumes for the other characters that you've unlocked.
Visually, Street Fighter 6 doesn't aim too high for realism but is wonderfully stylized with vibrant colors and excellent lighting. Unlike Street Fighter IV, characters don't seem stiffly animated, and compared to Street Fighter V, hair is rendered to look like hair. The only major negative in regard to visuals is the dithering effects used on both transparency and motion blurring. The previously mentioned graphical issues with World Tour don't apply to the other game modes.
But how does the combat itself play? Amazingly well. It's a sequel that looks and feels like a proper sequel. None of the animations from Street Fighter V are reused, with the exception of some of Luke's, as he was essentially back-ported to Street Fighter V. Each new system introduced is fun and the characters don't feel limited. The primary new system introduced, the Drive Gauge, is the total opposite of Street Fighter V's “V-Trigger.” Unlike the V-Trigger system, which had to be built up in a match, making your character feel limited until that point, the Drive Gauge is available for use and full at the start of each round.
Drive Gauge is used for many of the game's universal mechanics, and nothing that is character-specific. Blocking attacks will drain the meter, as does using Over-Drive attacks, Drive-Rush, and Drive-Impact. Over-Drive attacks are this title's EX attacks (powered-up versions of standard special attacks with unique abilities). Drive-Rush is basically a dash-cancel that can be used to apply pressure on your enemy. Finally, Drive-Impact is basically a re-invention of the Focus Attack from Street Fighter IV. You're not able to cancel out of this ability, however it can absorb two attacks and gives priority to the player countering when both players activate a Drive-Impact. What this means is the player reacting to a Drive-Impact with their own will always win the exchange.
Parrying also returns as a re-invented universal mechanic. It's very different from Street Fighter III's though, as now it's a player-state that must be activated. Proper use of parries in Street Fighter 6, unlike the other “Drive” abilities, will not drain the Drive-Gauge. Once activated, your character will go into a parry state, where each of the enemy's attacks is deflected, with the exception of grabs. This is very useful for ambiguous cross-ups, where it's hard to know which direction you should block. It's also important to note that, unlike in Street Fighter III, parries do not change the recovery state; if an enemy's attack was safe on block, it's still safe on block if you parry it.
There is, however, the "perfect parry." A perfect parry is performed successfully when a parry is activated within a two-frame window of the impact of an enemy attack and the game goes into a slowdown allowing you time to make visual confirmation and follow up. As the game runs at 60fps for competitive reasons, that gives you 33.34 milliseconds. Before anyone stops me here to tell me how it's impossible to react at that speed, it's from the moment the enemy attack makes contact. So, if an attack has a slow start-up (at 16 frames, for example), it's in your hands to activate the parry (as pictured above). For all other instances of faster attacks, you would either block, get out of the range of the attack, or use the parry anyway in anticipation.
Words alone simply cannot explain how great and open-ended of a system Street Fighter 6 has. There are so many ways to respond to a situation, and because there can be multiple correct answers to a solution, the gameplay doesn't grow stale. Movement feels snappy. Nothing about the game feels slow. In fact, the Modern Control type is perfect for characters you don't know how to play as. All you need is a bit of common sense and you can get far enough to decide if you like the character. I would never use Modern Controls for my main character, but for one I'm just trying out or selected randomly? Sure, why not? In terms of the gameplay and what's to be expected from a fighting title, it's close to perfect. What could be done to make it better? Add some more characters. That isn't to say that the entire package is close to perfect, though, because honestly it's not.
The soundtrack is amazing and something that you could listen to while not playing the game, but there is an exception: the character themes. Every last one of them is awful. The Street Fighter II themes and other classic jingles from the series are absent and I'm happy about that; listening to Ryu's Street Fighter II stage theme for the 37th time isn't something I want either. Luckily, not only are there character themes, but stage themes as well, and they can be swapped in the game's options, with the exception of the replay playback system.
Lastly, there is one additional game mode: the Battle Hub. This is an online lobby system where you can use your avatar to interact with the other players or sit down at one of the many virtual arcade cabinets. Even though a majority of the cabinets are used for standard Versus mode games, some of the other machines feature party modes, which consist of hazards spawning into the match that both players must avoid. If that's not enough, there are even some cabinets that feature classic Capcom arcade titles, such as Final Fight, Captain Commando, and Street Fighter II, among other titles that are rotated. There's also text chat, but nowhere in Street Fighter 6 are you able to use your microphone to chat with other players.
Street Fighter 6 on its surface may not seem to be all that big, but as you get into the game and really dig down into its admittedly very confusing menus, there's a lot on offer. Some areas are clearly more polished than others though, to the extent that it even feels like some of them were produced by a different team of developers.
Despite the few minor issues I have with the game, the efforts made to open up Street Fighter 6 to new players while somehow not sacrificing the veteran player experience are fantastic. Many fighting games try to do this and fail. Street Fighter 6 is the most successful attempt at simplifying for a new audience since Marvel vs. Capcom 2, and I'd argue it does an even better job at it than that title. It's also a complete package that won't have you wondering where the rest of the game is, unlike some titles being released today.
This review is based on a digital copy of Street Fighter 6 for the PC
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