Like Ryu discovering a dark energy in himself powerful enough to level mountains in his fights against Akuma, something about the ass-kicking that Street Fighter V got at launch from fans and critics alike woke something up in Capcom. Certainly, Street Fighter 6 feels like the developer’s “and we took that personally” moment of reckoning. Because compared to Street Fighter V and Marvel vs Capcom Infinite, Street Fighter 6 hits hard, and in ways that the series hasn’t since the magnificent Street Fighter III: Third Strike back in 1999.
That’s more than a shallow comparison, because even more than Third Strike, Street Fighter 6 goes all in on its stunning neon-graffiti aesthetic, whose wild stylings are underscored by a hip-hop- and acid jazz-infused soundtrack that makes the game feel more like a semi-photoreal Jet Set Radio than a Street Fighter experience. But that’s just on the surface, because this is a game that successfully channels the halcyon days of Street Fighter’s arcade dominance, and it’s on an adrenaline-fueled quest to get everyone hyped to get back into a ring where they all belong.
That’s no small feat at a time where the Street Fighter stretch of the EVO tournament is one of the most watched competitive gaming events in the world but the highest selling fighting game is the hyper-accessible Super Smash Bros Ultimate, and by a considerable margin. Capcom, then, has cracked a rather important code with Street Fighter 6: Rather than forcing avowed button mashers to try to catch up with the pros, the developer presents a slew of new features tailormade to let players wade into the pool at the depth they’re comfortable with.
Street Fighter’s classic-but-complex six-button control scheme is now joined by two new options that allow players to either button-mash their way into combos or simplify inputs into Marvel vs Capcom 3-style Light/Medium/Heavy/Special buttons that can change contextually—that is, depending on the direction the player decides to attack from. The trade-off is that choosing the simplified controls reduces damage output, meaning hardcore fighters can still mop the floor with the less skilled who chose to just hit buttons at random, but those newbies can still walk away with the slightest hint of their dignity intact.
Those willing to raise their game a bit more will want to slip into Street Fighter 6’s training mode, a comprehensive set of tutorials that meticulously teach character-specific combos, strategies for movement, cancels, dodges, hitboxes, and much, much more. That’s gold-standard stuff for modern fighting games—Arc System Works titles in particular—but Street Fighter 6 is still impressively meticulous about how it goes about schooling the player.
The game even gives you the option to learn its new gimmick mechanics—a versatile and intuitive parry and armored-offense system using a pool of energy called the Drive Gauge—before you even get to the main menus. That said, not every gamer is training to face Daigo Umehara anytime soon, and there are those who will come to Street Fighter 6 for a fun time, rather than a long one. But Capcom also has their backs, and not just with a perfunctory “beat 5-to-10 opponents to get an ending” Arcade Mode, which you can’t call a DLC this time around.
As for the game’s crown jewel, its name is World Tour. For all intents and purposes, this is the single-player Street Fighter RPG (more Yakuza: Like a Dragon than Final Fantasy) that the world never knew it needed. Here, players create a custom fighter—which you can carry into online modes—using a robust create-a-character feature, and after some basic training from newbie character Luke (think John Cena with a black belt), you’re off to hit the streets in search of good competition, maybe even take down a criminal syndicate or two while you’re at it.
World Tour is a breezy good time, though some may be bothered by the somewhat grindy climb for XP, a few irksome difficulty spikes with some bosses, and the mild stinginess with custom gear/accessories. But worry not, as the mode’s delightfully loopy sense of humor, deep reverence for Street Fighter and Final Fight lore, and the most endearing, casually humanizing portrayal of Street Fighter’s main roster ever more than make up for any frustrations.
Arguably, the real magic of this mode is that in the process of leveling up, getting into perpetual random fights with bystanders on the street, and using special moves for platforming (and more) works to sneakily teach players how to use every character on the roster. This imparts knowledge bit by bit, letting players equip special moves a la carte, in order to figure out the playstyle that works best for them. The process may not be as in-depth as what’s provided by the tutorials, but more than just casual players will deem it to be infinitely more of a good time.
That steady sense of progression and improvement eventually leads players to the masterstroke that is Street Fighter 6’s online hub. It’s a fully interactive hub laid out like a snazzy arcade where you can take your World Tour avatar, sit down at a Street Fighter 6 cabinet in-game to start a match or spectate, run to the center to start a fight against someone else’s avatar, or play a small, rotating selection of old-school Capcom games like Final Fight and Vulgus, even Street Fighter II. It’s a glorious fighter’s playground, where one can spend hours tooling around, having a blast, and never actually have to play against another human in an online match.
And that’s just scratching the surface of the game’s pleasures. There’s the professional match commentary, the surprising character details and bond system in World Tour, the fabulously nonbinary tournament emcee Eternity, the return of bonus stages, the battle-rap style intros for Versus matches, the create-a-character’s intricacies actually affecting gameplay, the character-specific voice lines during the Arcade mode’s final boss fights. Which is to say, Street Fighter 6 is the most feature-rich, welcoming, and inclusive package ever crafted for a fighting game—a stylish reassertion of creative dominance for the series that started it all, and an endlessly rewarding new foundation for its future. The next generation of fighting games starts right here.
This game was reviewed with code provided by fortyseven communications on June 5.
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This is the worst version of Street Fighter I’ve ever played and the most I’ve ever payed for it. Just stick to previous versions. This adds nothing new.