Review: STREET FIGHTER 6 punches new and old fighters alike

DISCLAIMER: I enjoy many fighting games, but I’m not a professional nor a frequent player of fighting games. Also, this review will be based solely on its single-player and offline modes. An update on online play and stability is coming this weekend after playing for a while with the general public. This review is based on the PS5 version of Street Fighter 6.

As one of the oldest mainstream fighting games, each new iteration of Street Fighter faces a plethora of modern problems. Whether it’s an increasingly dedicated fan base, a plethora of newcomers, accessibility options, new gameplay expectations, a more intense online presence, or many other things, Street Fighter 6 does a great job of checking all those boxes in a refined package. While there are still flaws in the main story and character designs, Street Fighter 6 feels like the best version of itself we could have expected.

Street Fighter 6 is easily one of the most approachable and accessible fighting games in a long time. For veterans of the franchise, the roster of new and old characters is well balanced and strong. The controls are smooth and responsive, and the competitive gameplay is very satisfying. But for gamers who aren’t used to Street Fighter games or fighting games in general, the added modern controls setup is phenomenal and allows you to focus more on the comings and goings of the game against your enemy, instead of trying to do the correct inputs. The World Tour single player mode is especially useful for new players, but can be exhausting for anyone familiar with fighting games. It starts slow and goes slow, which is good for those who are not familiar with fighting games. But the slow pace can be relatively boring for everyone else. The best part of the world tour is the ability to create your own character and use various special moves and inputs from the characters in the game. Unfortunately, players cannot take those created characters to offline mode. Hopefully, later on, the developers will bring the ability to play those uniquely designed characters into spaces where we can show them to other people.

We continue to talk about the World Tour, offline single player story mode. It’s very slow and should have taken about half the time to finish. There are a lot of really great ideas, but those ideas are bogged down by loads of side quests and a relatively useless open world to pass the time. A more streamlined experience, giving players the option to spend more time discovering what they wanted or letting them push themselves quickly to the end would have been better overall. It’s a good mode when viewed more as an extended tutorial with creative features, but it’s not the reason to play Street Fighter 6.

As with other offline modes, the game offers just the right amount of options to keep players entertained alone or with other people for a long time. The standard arcade mode has the option of being shorter or longer, allowing players to fight through a classic series of battles with a short story for each character. As far as offline PvP is concerned, there are 1v1, team battles and wild and wacky extreme battles that introduce interesting approaches to health bars, wacky combat conditions and much more. It might not seem all that robust at first, but after going through the details of all the options within each mode, there’s plenty to keep a player busy as they get to know all the characters and work on their proficiency in those characters.

As beautiful as the game is aesthetically, there is something off about the characters. While Street Fighter’s unique design has taken shape in the last two entries, especially starting with Street Fighter 4, the extreme bulkiness and stylized form is starting to hit an uncanny valley as textures, facial expressions, and more aspects become more realistic. Basically, the game looks too good for its own good. The individual parts like the eyes, colors, lighting, and textures all look pretty amazing, but the proportions and bodies of the characters feel overly exaggerated and daunting. This is especially evident during the World Tour mode. Trying to create a character that isn’t awful to look at is pretty tough. And you’ll be dealing with dozens or hundreds of randomly generated characters who love to swing through that uncanny valley of weird and out of proportion. Maybe this is just a very personal opinion on the style of Street Fighter 6, but at least the main characters look pretty nice. It can be really fun to create incredibly strange characters, but it’s a shame that the style of the main characters fits so badly with the characters created and the world tour that it can become annoying.

The last things to really mention here are the game’s actual tutorial/training mode and in-game announcers. The tutorial/training mode is by far one of the best ever. Going from learning the basics of movement to using special techniques, inversions and other moves is fast and fun. This gives players of all skill levels the ability to ramp up their fighting skills efficiently and this is how all tutorials should go. And to quickly mention the in-game commenter feature, it’s great. The voices and commentary are lively, engaging and make every game more exciting.

Street Fighter 6 is a very strong entry into the franchise and an excellent fighting game overall. It has its various flaws, especially in the World Tour mode, but it really is a great game for new and old players or anyone in between.