Capcom’s long-running fighting game series is back with Street Fighter 6. With an all-new style and some old and new faces, the iconic series has returned, with Capcom determined to learn from the launch of Street Fighter 5 and deliver a great content-filled game.
Touring the World
World Tour is the primary single-player mode and in a first for Street Fighter features an open world for you to explore with your created avatar. Its narrative vaguely follows the events in the comic book and the arcade mode as you go on a journey through the world searching for strength. Along the way, you meet the game’s cast of playable characters who mostly serve as teachers for your characters to learn from. You can increase your bond with these characters to unlock more conversations with the characters.
You run around the streets of Metro City and Nayshall amongst other iconic locales from the Street Fighter series, meeting the cast of the game and some surprisingly deep-cut characters. Along the way, you’ll find yourself performing a plethora of fetch quests and “Fight X person” as you take your character to the top of the fighting food chain, spurred on by your relationship with your rival, the World Tour exclusive character Bosch.
World Tour has plenty of Easter eggs for fans of the series and the light RPG mechanics as you level up your character and pick out moves for them are quite entertaining. Sadly, this is dragged down by the poor quest pool and the sheer amount of grinding you need to do to get the better moves and backstory of the characters.
It is an ambitious mode and does have its merits. Unfortunately, the awkward pacing of its narrative and the amount of back and forth, multiplied with so much padding to fill out its 20+ hour run time isn’t enticing enough to pull you away from the meat of Street Fighter 6.
I feel that while Street Fighter 6’s main focus isn’t its story, it’s certainly not bad. It has some great likable characters in its fantastic roster made up of familiar faces and some great newcomers.
More Modes
Outside of World Tour, there is the Battle Hub and Fighting Ground.
Battle Hub is the Street Fighter 6’s main hub mode. You can join lobbies populated with other players online with your custom character. In Battle Hub, you can go to the many arcade cabinets around the lobby and play online matches or spectate others, or you can play Avatar Battles which pit you against other players’ custom characters with their customized move sets. In the battle hub, there are also cabinets that let you play classic Capcom titles such as Final Fight or Street Fighter 2. All of these make for a great lobby experience where you have a good variety of things to choose from, from playing classic Capcom games to playing ranked matches.
Fighting Ground is where you’ll find all the things you’d expect from a fighting game. The standards of Versus, Training, Arcade, and Online Matches are here. The Arcade mode pits you against a series of opponents in either 5 or 12 stages to go through that character’s story and unlock some artwork and cutscenes. The Training mode is a great tool to train your skill, for newcomers and veterans alike. It has helpful tools to get to grips with the characters and their key techniques, including advanced features such as frame data. The online modes work great with the netcode being greatly improved from previous entries. It feels smooth.
Break Out That Special Move
Each character has their own unique move set that makes them feel different and has them fit into a variety of totally different playstyles, which keeps things fun. For example, Cammy focuses on quick attacks while newcomer Marisa hits hard but slower. The game’s roster is great too, being made up of returning well-known characters like Ryu and Ken along with some newcomers like Manon or the new villain JP.
The main new mechanic for the game comes in the form of the drive meter. This allows for a few new abilities such as a Drive Impact: A slow but armored attack that can lead to massive damage combos if it lands. On the other side, it opens you up if the opponent reacts in time, creating a huge risk-reward situation. There’s also drive parry, which lets you parry incoming attacks along with a quick dash using a drive rush. All of these moves take up part of your drive meter, which leaves you in burnout when empty. This comes with all sorts of disadvantages if it happens.
The core gameplay of the game feels great. The moves feel powerful, combos work well, and the game still feels accessible to newcomers through some great additions. One of the ways it feels accessible is through a modern control scheme which simplifies controls to make things less heavy on motion inputs. This is good for getting the grips of the game. The more time you put into the game, learning the systems and characters, the more fun the game gets. Coming out on top in a close match is a great feeling and feels satisfying when you manage to get the win.
I spent the most time with the game playing online matches, slowly climbing up the ranks over time. It felt rewarding to see my improvement.
Graphics and Sound
The series makes the leap to RE Engine this time around, the engine used in most recent Capcom games like Resident Evil 4 Remake and Devil May Cry. This has brought with it a massive visual upgrade compared to Street Fighter V.
The game has an all-new visual style which really makes the characters pop in the environments. The character models themselves look amazing, all of them feeling expressive and some of the characters’ redesigned outfits look even better than their older designs.
The stages look fantastic and each is unique in their own way. This really helps to add a good amount of variety in long sessions playing the game. I’m not a fan of looking at the same stage over and over again while playing for hours.
The animations for moves also look fantastic. I feel they are easily the best animated since the series made the jump to 3D visuals. It looks and feels impactful when used with flashy special moves. The cinematic supers all look great too, really adding to Street Fighter 6’s distinctive graffiti-influenced style which is seen all through the game.
With the character models, I’d particularly note that facial expressions are amazingly detailed, with each character having a few to choose from during the loading screen of a match. It really shows what the RE Engine can do. The games’ character creation is also great, letting you customize your character to your heart’s content before using them in World Tour or in the Battle Hub. There are a huge amount of ways to make your character uniquely yours. To sum up, the game is presented incredibly well, with a distinctive style that fits the game well and great character and stage designs to back it up.
Street Fighter 6’s soundtrack fits its style well, with upbeat themes for each character. There are some great tracks in there. I particularly like the Juri theme and the theme for the France stage. While I feel that the soundtracks for earlier games in the series are better in some ways, the game definitely has a good soundtrack with some memorable songs in it. The voice acting is spectacular too, with the voice actors bringing the characters to life, each of them bringing their personality to the role well and making the characters seem even more likable. The audio here adds to the distinctive style of the game well.
Verdict
Overall, I feel that Street Fighter 6 is an amazing fighting game that has a lot to offer both newcomers to the franchise and veterans alike. The gameplay is incredibly fun and is the most accessible the series has ever been. There’s sure to be something to like about the game for everybody. Whether you’ve been playing the game for years or you’re a newcomer, there’s no better time for people to jump into the series and start playing one of the best fighting games in recent years.
STREET FIGHTER 6 IS HIGHLY RECOMMENDED
If you would like to see more fighting games, you may be interested in our review of JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure: All-Star Battle R or our coverage of this Street Fighter documentary.
Many thanks go to Capcom for a PlayStation 5 review code for this title.
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