Street Fighter 6 Review

Street Fighter 6 is the latest entry in Capcom’s flagship 1v1 fighter that first released way back in 1987 and boy it came a long way. With 2023’s newest entry, the house that built Resident Evil looks to innovate; as you’d want to do after your franchise has been alive and kicking for over 30 years. Street Fighter VI is broken down into three “blocks” or gameplay bubbles: Fighting Ground, Battle Hub and World Tour.

First up, let’s begin with the new game mode, World Tour. This mode is basically a 3D Final Fight clone mixed with some RPG mechanics. You create your own fighter; don’t expect Skyrim level of customization here; it’s just the basics. You can obviously buy new accessories to give your character a unique look as you progress through the story.

You’ll start up in Final Fight’s Metro city as you explore the city and complete objectives. You’ll come across NPCs of varying levels that you can challenge to a fight. Now while the roaming around is in 3D,, combat flips into 2D; obviously, it works when you’re one on one, but further into the story, groups of nameless cronies will grab you into battle where the game still flips to 2D, but you’ll be going up against 3 enemies at once.

It does feel a clunky as sometimes your protagonist will flip side automatically if an enemy gets close from behind. As you progress, you’ll come across various new and familiar faces from Street Fighter such as Luke or Chun-Li. They’ll ask you to do menial questing and they’ll reward you with their fighting styles. It’s a nice touch because you easily change fighting style from your cellphone.

Along with swiftly changing your fighting style, your cellphone acts as a hub where you can receive communications,equip/unequip gear. As you go deeper into the story, you’ll be able to travel to different countries for some environment variety; traveling can also be easily done via the phone.

Battle Hub is where you’ll want to go for online competition. From the matches I had, the connection is stable as a whole, but expect stiff competition. What’s interesting however is that you’ll be asked to sit at an arcade cabinet to wait for another player. It’s a nice little detail. There are also Golden cabinet which will add a layer of challenge with modifiers during your fight. You can also join clubs with other players and also have your avatar fight against other players’ avatars.

The biggest nuisance with the online, and it seems to be growing trends: you can’t just play online. You have to create an account and link it with your Microsoft account. This kind of practice needs to go away because not everyone is looking to keep tabs on their stats and whatnot; more casual gamers just want to jump into a quick match without have the sizzle. And for reviewers, we more often than not need to play the mode for proper review and don’t care about stats and such as the game will be deleted once the review is done.

And then there’s Fighting Ground. This is where you’ll want to start off if you’re a newcomer to the series or to sharpen your skills. There is a handful of offline modes such as Arcade (a.k.a. classic “story” mode), Practice, Versus (1v1 or team; against AI or a friend), Special Match (where you can choose rules such as having hazards interfere in the match). And if you’re looking for a more simplistic approach to Online matches, it’s here. Under Online, you can choose from Ranked, Casual Match or Custom Room.

One thing is for sure, visually, Street Fighter VI is the brightest and shiniest game of all the series. The game just oozes styles and colors. Even during combat, pulling off specific moves, there will be a splash of color and thankfully it doesn’t distract as much; it sometimes feels like it amplifies the move. Each character has their own style; aside from Ken and Ryu’s similarities. Each level is uniquely designed with their theme; thankfully, the color scheme and detailed design ensure that characters don’t mesh with the background. The soundtrack is a mix bag. It’s not as iconic as the classic Street Fighter II and Street Fighter III soundtracks, but it does offer an upbeat and diverse score.

While at its core, Capcom can’t do no real wrong with their beloved fighter, SF6 does have two nuisances. The first one being that World Tour is basically Final Fight from Wish.com. It’s nice that they implemented a different game mode, but there’s no challenge to it. Constantly backtracking and being treated by a fetch dog becomes annoying and boring fast. You can also either single button mash or grab your way to victory; even against proper Street Fighter characters. The other nuisance is something that’s plaguing gaming as a whole: DLC/Microtransactions. Games nowadays are already expensive as it is and having to spend more to benefit from unavailable characters smack dab in your face is low. There’s also way too much talking in World Tour mode.

Street Fighter 6 is definitely a step up and vast improvement from the PS4/PC exclusive Street Fighter V; more content, slightly bigger roster, more gameplay variety. It’s also more stylish and gameplay is addictive. But the thin launch roster of character (17; compared to Tekken 8‘s 32), overly complex online hub, tedious World Tour mode does impact the overall quality of the game. As with most games with DLC/Seasonal content, it feels incomplete and having favorites left out from launch is a bit irritating. That being said, the core gameplay is as perfect as could be and SFVI can easily be an entry point for newcomers to the series and the genre. If you’re looking for a diverse experience, you can’t go wrong with Street Fighter VI.