Street Fighter 6 review: a new gold standard for fighting games | Digital Trends

From ranked online play to more gimmicky Extreme Battles, Battle Grounds provides a variety of options so players can tailor their fighting game match experience to their liking. At release, Street Fighter 6 contains a roster of 18 characters. This isn’t the biggest roster on the market, but each fighter is incredibly refined in how they look and play. Series staples like Ryu, Ken, and Chun-Li are all present and accounted for here, with new looks that show us older, more world-weary versions of the characters. And newcomers like Jamie and Kimberly have instantly iconic designs and distinct movesets that make them feel different from any fighter in this series that has come before them.

No matter who you pick, every fighter in Street Fighter 6 has some inherent draw, and the game provides more than enough tutorials and training to allow new players to get the hang of the character. As always, this new version of Street Fighter is a fighting game all about the fundamentals. Understanding a character’s best moves and combos, the best times to use them, and where to place your character when you pull them off is crucial to coming out on top in the fight. What’ll take a bit more time to get used to are the new gimmicks layered on top of the core fighting mechanics.

Fights are full of excitement and have an intense push-and-pull feeling, thanks to the new Drive Gauge system. During a fight, players can use this meter to do things like parry, enhance special moves, and pull off colorful and disruptive Drive Impacts that can absorb incoming attacks and turn the tide of the fight. Players can burn out this meter if they use it all up, though, and will then be at a disadvantage as they wait for it to recharge. The Drive Gauge enables fights that feel as a dramatic as WWE match.

Players create an avatar for World Tour mode with the deepest and most impressive customization options outside of Black Desert Online and last year’s Saints Row. Even if you don’t feel represented through someone in the main roster, you can craft a character you’re more comfortable playing as here. Once players do that, they are thrown into a 20-plus-hour globe-trotting journey where they meet classic Street Fighter and Final Fight characters as they search for the meaning of strength. It’s a lighthearted, over-the-top narrative seen through the eyes of a delightful doofus. Still, similar to the Like a Dragon games, it can take some darker, politically driven turns as it tackles topics like corrupt governments and shady charities taking advantage of struggling developing countries.

Those twists and turns kept me enthralled throughout the entire adventure, and that level of engagement is vital because this isn’t a short, linear romp; it’s a 20-hour RPG where I can fully explore Metro City and Nayshall, visit other countries like Italy and France, and fight almost every NPC I come across. Yes, you can walk up to pretty much anyone in World Tour and ask them to fight, or just Shoryuken them in the back to get some preemptive damage and start a fight. It’s like if you fought people instead of Pokémon in Scarlet and Violet.

While some fights play out in a traditional round-based format, at other points, players can fight multiple enemies at once in battles that feel closer to a beat ’em up like Final Fight. You’ll need to do a healthy mix of both to stay at a viable level throughout the adventure. Having these fights also feeds back into progression as players level up and gain items by completing in-battle challenges. It also allows players to rank up their relationship with a Master. During the story, players will encounter all 18 characters from Street Fighter 6’s launch roster and can convince them to become one of your Masters.

Doing so grants access to their fighting style, and using that style in combat will level up Style and Bond ranks with them, unlocking more of their special moves and Super Arts. The best part is that those can be mixed and matched, so you could potentially create a fighter that uses Ryu’s Hadoken, Chun-Li’s Spinning Bird Kick, Ken’s Shoryuken, and Guile’s Sonic Hurricane. I spent the most time using Dee Jay’s fighting style, but incorporated special attacks from other great melee characters like Luke and Marisa. Combine this with the customization options present, and World Tour lets you create tons of varied fighter moveset combinations.

On the surface, one might not expect Street Fighter 6 to scratch the open-world RPG itch, but World Tour does so in an original way that also familiarizes players with the core fighting mechanics. If you play through the story and do many of the tutorial sidequests available across Metro City and Nayshall, you’ll have a deep understanding of all of Street Fighter 6’s systems.

World Tour does fall into some RPG clichés that made the experience more frustrating the further I got into it. There are a lot of fetch quests and other repetitive objectives that get stale the more you have to do them. In the game’s later stages, enemies’ health bars get bigger and bigger; while you can use items to heal during a fight or give any of your character’s stats a boost, you’ll be forced to grind on basic enemies to get strong enough to overcome certain fights.

I understand that endurance is an important skill for a fighting game player to have, but at times it becomes exhausting. Thankfully, that moment-to-moment fighting is enjoyable enough to make grinding a bit of fun. While World Tour isn’t flawless, Street Fighter 6 is a better game for having it. It makes the game appeal to a whole new batch of players and enables me to recommend Street Fighter 6 to RPG and beat ’em up fans just as much as I can to fighting game fans.

Battle Hub

Battle Hub allows its multiplayer experience to go a step further than just ranked or casual matches in Fighting Grounds. It’s a giant virtual arcade where players can show off their avatars, form Clubs, set the characters they want to fight as, and approach players at a virtual arcade cabinet to fight them in a 1v1 match. This spans traditional fights, the gimmicky Extreme Battles, and even Avatar battles, where one can fight other human players with the movesets made in World Tour.

Fighting games like Dragon Ball Xenoverse have had areas similar to this before, but Capcom executes the idea with grace here and successfully creates a virtual space that feels like the arcades of old. It also serves as a Cacpom and Street Fighter history museum of sorts; you can play arcade cabinets for classics like Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo or Street Fighter II: The World Warrior in the Battle Hub’s Game Center. It’s not the most complex multiplayer space available in gaming, but it hits all the right notes to become a solid virtual hangout spot for all types of fighting game fans. Gamers don’t need corporate-filled metaverses; we like fun virtual spots to hang out with friends in our favorite multiplayer games.

Street Fighter 6 is a multiplayer experience that you can safely bet won’t be shut down anytime soon. The series has been well-supported post-launch by Capcom over the years, and we already know the DLC characters coming over the next year. New additions to Battle Hub and World Tour have also been promised, and Street Fighter 6 will eventually get a Battle Pass-like system called a Fighting Pass to deepen multiplayer progression. Even with titles like Tekken 8 and Mortal Kombat 1 on the horizon, Street Fighter 6 will be eternally entertaining, not just for hardcore fighting game fans, but anyone remotely interested in them.

From its control options to World Tour’s RPG setup, Street Fighter 6 ensures that it can be a fighting game for pretty much any type of player. You’re likely to find your physical, cultural, or gaming background represented within this game somewhere and have all of the tools at your disposal to go from flashy amateur play to seasoned pro, all in one of the best-looking games of this console generation. Street Fighter 6 is the ultimate fighting game and should be the new gold standard for the genre.