A fighting game renaissance is upon us, starting with this newest entry in the Street Fighter franchise. With a refreshed new style in a new engine with new mechanics, Street Fighter 6 aims to bring in new players and appease veterans of previous titles. New characters with unique fighting styles such as Manon, Marisa, JP, Kimberly, Lily, and Jamie hit the roster with some new and maybe somewhat familiar moves.
The new Drive Impact mechanic replaces V-Gauge abilities and improves on it. With new additions and a much-needed improvement over Street Fighter V, will this new game live up to the hype? Find out more in our review of Street Fighter 6!
This is a review coupled with a supplemental video review. You can watch the video review or read the full review of the below:
Street Fighter 6
Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Platforms: Microsoft Windows (Reviewed), PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S
Release Date: June 2, 2023
Players: 1-60 (online)
Price: $59.99 USD
World Tour mode is more than a traditional single-player experience. Embarking on an adventure to seek strength, you will meet a bunch of familiar faces including Chun-Li, Dee-Jay, and more. From them, you can learn different styles and even mix and match moves to make your preferred fighting style.
Metro City is the main hub of most of the story featuring enemies like the Mad Gear gang, robots, and construction workers to name a few. Fighting random people and enemies with certain challenges can give you more experience to level you and your style’s teacher.
Throughout Metro City, you’ll find side missions that can earn you Zenny which you can use to buy clothes, food, and items to use in battle. All of these experiences in the world of Street Fighter, like never seen before, contain hours of content with lots of references to other characters from the past.
Grinding isn’t tedious, but rather rewarding by giving new gear with perks, experience to get more moves, and upgrading your character with the included skill tree to upgrade damage and vitality.
The Battle Hub is your location for matching up and playing with other created characters online. The Hub supports up to 60 people at the same time, wherein you can spectate matches, emote and chat, and play old-school Capcom games on the cabinets that rotate each week.
Online has been improved to support different regions with different rooms and it’s easier to match up with others. Rollback net code has been improved as well and there’s more detailed information about your opponent’s connection at the top of the screen and before you sit down at a cabinet to play against them.
Fighting Grounds is where story mode for characters, local versus, and tutorials can be located. One of the biggest additions to Street Fighter 6 is the new Modern control scheme, which makes it more inviting to newer players who aren’t quite up to speed with regular players using Classic controls. From experience, the modern controls can be helpful for learning some new characters first and then changing to Classic to further master them for a more traditional feeling.
Street Fighter 6 features 18 playable characters with a confirmed additional four via the Fighter Pass. Newcomers like Kimberly, JP, Manon, Jamie, Lilly, and Marisa bring more fighting styles and moves to the roster, each with their own personality. Unlike its predecessor, all returning characters play like their original iterations instead of the reworked styles from Street Fighter V.
Each character has guides that not only tell you about the moves they can do, but they give detailed explanations of how each move works and what its best uses are. You have the ability to try out the moves to get a better understanding of when to execute them. Labbing your favorite characters is much improved and allows you to tackle whatever you want any way you want.
Drive Impact, a new mechanic, can be used offensively and defensively for setups or reversals, but using it too much can lead to Burnout. The Drive Meter can be refilled over time or by landing hits on your opponent and it’s a separate bar from your Super Arts.
From all of these gameplay modes and improvements in Street Fighter 6, Capcom has given much attention to detail to NOT do what they did in Street Fighter V and it’s worked amazingly with fluid gameplay.
Using the RE Engine for the first time, graphics are improved in Street Fighter 6 with a more realistic art style. Graffiti, street, and neon-inspired themed menus and such is the new focus of the rebrand. Previously, Street Fighter was more centered around martial arts and had used the Unreal Engine after moving away from 2D sprites.
Even the music in Street Fighter 6 is centered around rap and other urban influences to give more big-city vibes. With the new audio also being used, there is a new addition of accessibility audio that can aid in hearing indications of when players hit high, low, have low vitality, and more.
Commentators, which are from fighting game community personalities, can also be heard during matches if you choose to add them to spice up each match.
On PC, there were stuttering issues even with current graphic drivers and after compiling shaders for optimization. Fights felt like slow motion and were hard to play as a result. In World Tour mode, fights are limited to 30 frames per second but can be toggled to 60 in the menus. It’s one of the only places in the game that feel lackluster and hopefully will receive a patch to fix.
The resurgence of Street Fighter after nearly seven years is a sight to behold. Street Fighter 6 learned from its mistakes in Street Fighter V by having a full story mode and functioning online servers. Even the fighting feels razor-sharp and responsive.
However, the biggest drawback is the performance of World Tour mode which can deteriorate the experience of the world of Street Fighter. A mix of good and bad is Game Center games, which can be unlocked, cycle through each week, and can be found in locations in World Tour.
Ultimately, Street Fighter 6 delivers the fun and proves to be one of the most engaging fighting games of the year and of most recent memory.
There are still characters that haven’t returned in this game that some would consider staples like Balrog and Vega, but maybe they can return as DLC sometime later. Right now, Street Fighter 6 is a fully featured game, especially for the price which hasn’t moved from the industry standard of $59.99 USD.
Street Fighter 6 was reviewed on Windows PC using a copy provided by Capcom. You can find additional information about Niche Gamer’s review/ethics policy here. Street Fighter 6 will be available on June 2nd, 2023 for Windows (via Steam), Xbox Series S|X, PlayStation 4, and PlayStation 5.
