Street Fighter 6 Review (Patreon)

I miss the wild days of the fighting game boom, when it seemed like there was another random Capcom port or some weird-ass anime girl fighting game hitting the PlayStation every other month. But as the PS1 days wore on and the PS2 dawned, it felt like the end of an era. Mortal Kombat went into weird, weapons fighter territory. The Capcom ports and collections tapered off a bit because there weren’t as many new games coming out for them to bring home. Arcades themselves also started showing more signs of cooling off after Street Fighter II propped them up through the first half of the 90s. Despite Tekken, MK, and a few other franchises continuing on, the genre itself felt like it was drying up in the transition. This is a big part of why the release of Street Fighter IV was such a landmark event.

I first played SFIV in arcade cabinets set up at a Capcom event in Las Vegas. They had brought other games to the event—I want to say they had a golf game and… uh… a Neopets puzzle game? Also the public relations guy in charge brought a full Rock Band kit, just in case anyone wanted to play some Rock Band at night, when the event was over. But other than Rock Band, the only game I actually remember playing at that event was Street Fighter IV. It felt like exactly what the genre had been missing and it threaded the difficult needle that such a sequel absolutely needed to thread by balancing in favor of nostalgia with a decent dose of new stuff. That’s sort of the opposite approach that Street Fighter III took, and one of the reasons I think people were very cool on it at release. Street Fighter IV was doing its best to chase the good times you remembered having with Street Fighter II while evolving systems in ways that gave the player more options per character.

Street Fighter V, at first glance, seemed like a slam dunk. New systems and options like the V-Trigger felt a little easier to grasp than SFIV’s Focus Attacks. But by launching without a healthy single-player component, SFV felt like a game that was casting off that mid-level, more casual fan that made Street Fighter II the juggernaut that it was. You were either on-board with competitive play or you were pretty much locked out. It’s a shame, because there were some neat pieces in place, and over time, the game continued to evolve and add characters that helped round it out. But it never quite got over the hump. Street Fighter 6, then, feels like a game that learned the harsh lessons doled out by SFV’s launch while also making even more deliberate efforts to widen the player base. While I’m not 100% sold that the game’s new, simplified control options will have a massive impact on the number of players playing Street Fighter competitively, I think the game is largely successful at just about everything shooting for. The end result is a collection of modes and options that make for an extremely exciting competitive game while also providing so many fun things around the edges of that core experience that just about anyone will at least be able to find a way in. It’s a pretty remarkable feat.

SF6 comes with the requisite shuffling of meters that govern what you can do and when you can do it. Players now have a new meter called the drive gauge, and many of your secondary abilities pull from this recharging resource, rather than your standard super meter. EX moves are now called Overdrive modes. The concept is the same, it’s a way to do pumped-up versions of your special attacks, but it pulls from the drive gauge instead of costing you half of a super meter. SFIII-style parries are universal and the buttons can be held, giving players who might not be great at timing the button presses an opportunity to parry, though parrying perfectly has its benefits. The drive impact is probably the biggest representation of that drive gauge in action. It’s a slow-moving attack with a long wind-up, but it has some armor on it, so you’ll absorb enemy hits without getting knocked out of the animation. If it hits, it can set up opportunities for greater combos, wall bounces, stuns, and more. All of these options are easy to perform and, for the most part, it’s easy to understand their benefits.

Beyond that each character has three supers. Rather than being able to choose which level of a super you’ll do like, say, the Street Fighter Alpha games, here each super takes a different amount of meter. So Luke’s level 1 super is a bunch of projectiles, but at level 2 he can perform a flurry of punches… or you could just use your level 1 twice, and so on. This system feels like it’s built to be easy to understand while also giving players multiple options. At this point there’s no “super art select” or anything like that… but I bet they get there eventually.

The roster at launch consists of 18 characters, with just over half of them coming from the Street Fighter II era. Luke, the character who seems to be the poster boy for this one, will probably be new to many players but he technically debuted as the final DLC character for Street Fighter V. Juri from Street Fighter IV is also here, but the rest of the roster is new. Some of the new characters evoke existing characters in new ways—Lily, for example, has storyline ties to T.Hawk and has a couple of similar moves, but is a significantly faster fighter. When I first saw the game a year ago I remember thinking that it felt slower than the games that came before it. But after playing a lot of it, I don’t know that I’d say that it’s a slower game. Movement and jumps feel very deliberate, but special and supers are still ready in a flash. Some inputs have changed. Mashy attacks like Honda’s Hundred Hand Slap and Blanka’s electricity, for example, are now quarter-circle back and punch.

Inputs, obviously, are one of the major changes in Street Fighter 6. While I’ve been playing the game almost exclusively in the traditional or “classic” six-button mode, there’s a simplified control scheme available that reduces you to three attack buttons and a special button. While I haven’t knowingly played against enough players using the new, “modern” control scheme to definitively weigh in on it, I’ll say that after spending some time with it it seems well-designed. Players who could never get the hang of entering the classic dragon punch motion will be able to do dragon punches and other special moves with ease. However they’ll have fewer normal attacks and other options at their disposal. This seems like a smart way to get new players thinking about the actually important parts of a fighting game, like when and why to use a special attack, as opposed to just the how. I do wonder, though, if the new control scheme will ever feel limiting enough for those players in a way that inspires them to “graduate” to the normal controls. For local matches—meaning that it ain’t balanced for proper online play—there’s also a “dynamic” control scheme that seems like it’d be great for kids and a potential way to give players who have never played anything like this a chance to pull off some cool stuff. As someone who learned how to properly do a dragon punch sometime in 1991, I’ve had a hard time wrapping my mind around the simplified controls because my brain is already wired up to do it all the old way. I’d be interested in hearing about how newer players get on with the new schemes. They seem like smart additions that probably won’t break the game, even though they’ll certainly give whiny players something new to complain about online.

The game is broken up into three main modes. The battle hub is the online portion of the game. From here, you’re launched into a visual lobby with traditional Japanese arcade cabinets dotted around the landscape. You have a physical form in this mode, so you’ll walk around as a created character and sit down at the cabinets to signal to other players that you’re looking for a fight. You can also use more traditional menus to find ranked and unranked fights. Custom lobbies are also available for players who want to spar with a set group. In the middle of the hub is an avatar battle section, where you can fight against players as your created character. I was not able to try this out during the review period, but since these characters come from the story mode, where you build them out and slap together a collection of special moves from across the entire roster, I’m very excited to try this out… though only real sickos will probably take this mode seriously. The battle hub also contains a section with arcade cabinets running different Capcom arcade games, like Final Fight, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo, and Street Fighter II. You can play these emulated classics and post your scores to a leaderboard. It’s a slight section of the game, but one that helps make Street Fighter 6 feel even more like a celebration of the games that came before it and the company that made them. It’s a really excellent little touch that just makes the game feel like it has a little bit of everything.

For offline play there’s the fighting ground mode. Here you’ll find arcade mode, which gives you quick little intros and endings for each of the fighters. You can play local versus matches here and also dip into the extensive training mode, which gives you traditional open training as well as character and combo guides that help you understand the various options that each fighter has. These are invaluable and pretty well-done.

World tour is the game’s big story mode, and it’s absurd in all the right ways. You’ll start by creating a character, with sliders and settings that let you adjust arm length, butt size, and just about any other metric to ridiculous extremes. Upon creating a fighter you’re set loose in Metro City, where you’re given missions and moved along in a storyline about the fate of your fellow student and first rival. Along the way you’ll meet the proper Street Fighter roster and learn their moves and fighting styles. Using a character’s style levels you up in that particular style, unlocking more and more of that fighter’s list of specials. You’ll also level up generally, which moves you up a skill tree where you can unlock more special move slots, stat bonuses, and more.

The way a fighter plays is determined by which style you set. This gives you the entire non-special moveset of a Street Fighter character, so if you want all of your normals and target combos to be just like Ken, you can do that. But you also place specials and supers into slots. So if you want your fighter to generally move and fight like Ken, but also want them to have Honda’s torpedo, you can do that. Mixing and matching moves is really fascinating, and the only limitations are that you have a set number of slots to fill with specials and that you can’t have two moves that use the same controller motions, regardless of button. So you can’t have a hurricane kick and Luke’s lunging punch because even though they use different buttons, they both use quarter-circle back motions. I suspect this limitation is in place due to the modern control scheme not differentiating between punches and kicks? Either way, it forces you to make some choices about what you want to bring into battle and still allows for weird setups like… you can have a character that has a fireball and Guile’s sonic boom.

The story mode itself is silly and most of the game’s side-quests really lean into that silliness. You run around Metro City with the ability to fight just about anyone, and you can initiate those fights by either a menu option or by just walking up and punching someone. Enemies with boxes over their head will linger on street corners, lashing out in your direction if you get close. You’ll fight malfunctioning roombas. You’ll fight evil refrigerators. It’s a good time. That said, the mode is a little smaller than you might initially think and gets a little repetitive. For starters, there’s a world map that lets you do the whole world warrior thing by going and visiting fighters in other areas. But almost all of these areas are just a single screen, as opposed to Metro City, which contains a few city blocks for you to roam around. I was a little disappointed when I traveled for the first time and saw that the other areas weren’t going to have meaningful side quests or any kind of exploration. I think the other potential problem with world tour mode is that most of the fights are painfully simple. The variety comes from encountering gangs of enemies, which sends you into a “dramatic battle” kind of setting where you’re taking on two or three enemies at once. Sometimes you get caught between two enemies and they’ll rip you up pretty quickly. While most of the fights are simple, it does feel like there’s a sudden, late-game difficulty spike where the fights just become a drag because your opponent has a ton of life and does more damage than you do. So you find yourself chipping away at a huge lifebar only to get decimated in two or three hits. It’s weird.

I might also say that the relatively boneheaded AI in world tour mode might teach you some bad habits that’ll be hard to shake when you get online and start fighting real players, but that’s more something for you to watch out for than a condemnation of what is otherwise a funny and quaint mode that also serves as the method you’ll use to earn new moves for your created fighter. So if you intend to get serious about the avatar battle mode online, you’ll want to really wring everything you can out of the world tour.

World tour mode gives you the opportunity to acquire a lot of clothing for your fighter, but as it is 2023, there are also other ways to acquire cosmetic items. Online challenges will earn you a currency known as drive tickets. You can also pay real world money for “fighter coins,” which can be spent directly on cosmetic items for your created character, but can also be used to buy DLC fighters once they’re made available, outfits for the regular roster, and so on. The game will also have a battle pass with free and paid tracks. On top of that, you can purchase a season pass or a more expensive version of the game that will give you access to those DLC characters and stuff once they’re released. Personally, I’ll be curious to see if Capcom also inserts ads into the game, like they did with Street Fighter V, as that felt like it was just about over the line.

SF6 looks great and runs well on both PlayStation 5 and PC (I have not seen the Xbox version of the game as of this writing). The PS5 version contains a few settings around latency that may result in tearing, but this version also benefits from a 120hz display, which seems like an option designed to minimize tearing while still offering lower input latency. In direct comparison, the open world in Metro City looks a little worse on PS5’s performance mode than on PC at max settings, with grimier texture resolution and the aforementioned tearing.

I love the soundtrack in SF6. Thematically it feels like a bit of a callback to Third Strike, with a lot of questionable-but-charming rapping in the menus. But everything from the laid back mode select tracks to the more intense and character-themed in-game tracks are really sharp. The audio cues during fights are both good and helpful, particularly the noises played when a parry is done successfully.

More controversially, the game also has announcers that you can choose to use. There are a variety of play-by-play and color commentators to choose from, and it’s a really neat idea that I think will benefit newer players. Jeremy Lopez, one of the play-by-play options, will comment on things like life leads that can give players a little more situational awareness that they might not be used to tracking manually. The color commentators are a little less useful, but still add some flavor. I maintain that the best possible option here is for Capcom to get AEW’s duo of Taz and Excalibur in this game ASAP. I also think that the commentary gets repetitive rather quickly, which is a shame. Also, since any play-by-play commentator can be paired with any color commentator, the lines don’t feel like they connect. Instead of two people having a conversation about a fight it just feels like two robots rattling off lines without really thinking of what the other is saying. That said, I do think it’s a fantastic and fun idea that’ll at least get new players thinking more about the depth they might not be seeing out of the gate.

We’ll see how it goes once the game is out there and more professional players are getting their hands on it, but from where I’m sitting this is pretty much exactly what you’d want out of a modern fighting game. The netcode seems solid, the roster is varied and fun, and it has a wide array of options that people who aren’t just going to get online and stay there will find to be engaging and fun. It’s tempting to say that this is the game that Street Fighter V should have been, but I don’t think you get to SF6 without Capcom learning from the mistakes of the previous entry. All in all, it’s a solid foundation that’ll hopefully serve well as the Street Fighter of record for the next several years.

Unless they screw up and don’t put Hakan in the game at some point. I mean, come on. Give me my greasy oil man, you monsters.