Street Fighter 6 is a lot of fun!

We finally got to play Street Fighter 6 ourselves. Our first Gamepaly conclusion: You will either love or hate the new features.

When it comes to fighting games, I’m kind of an anteater. Dangerous enough to put many rivals to flight (for example kangaroos!), but also not a lion. I’ve played through every Street Fighter imaginable – even the disastrous first part or obscurities like Street Fighter EX or Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game -, chain together my combos, parries and cancels quite neatly and send most people packing at parties if there’s a Super Nintendo in the room (otherwise, of course, not).

But when I compete against professionals who count frame data and distinguish Invincible Reversals from Normal Reversals, I usually get similarly clobbered as the guy Bam Lee kicks full out of the frame. Some fighting games I only play in single player, in others I venture into ranked multiplayer – and in both I’m like new burgers at Burger King: good, but rarely super good.

Why am I telling you this? So you know exactly which direction I’m coming from as I celebrate for a whole while now how much fun I’m having with Street Fighter 6!

Street Fighter 6 is a true sequel. Sure, the maths foxes among you can tell by the 6 in the title, because that’s one bigger than the 5 in the predecessor (I’m a maths fox myself). But Street Fighter 6 also lives up to what makes a good sequel: it feels familiar, but also very, very different. It takes credit for an innovation and really pulls it off.

That innovation some – like me – will love, while others will demonise as much as this guy here Akuma’s devastating Shun Goku Satsu.

What did we play?

Capcom visited us with an extremely early PS5 version of Street Fighter 6, which won’t be released until sometime in 2023. Logically, there wasn’t much in the package yet: Just the Versus mode against AI or real humans with four playable characters: Ryu, Chun-Li and the two newer fighters Luke (from Street Fighter 5) and Jaime (celebrates his debut in Street Fighter 6). By the way, you can see them all in the first gameplay trailer, whose soundtrack I’ve been playing on repeat for days:

I know many fans are especially looking forward to the new Quasi-Open-World Story Mode World Tour, where I challenge opponents and advance my career in larger hub worlds with custom created Fighter. And hey, it can be cool, but I’m simple, I need three things above all in a fighting game:

• A cool arcade mode with a nice animated story ending for each fighter.
• A working matchmaking including stable netcode.
• Fun fights!

And at least the third point I can already assess: Street Fighter 6’s fights are really fun. There are two reasons for that.

Reason 1: Street Fighter is Street Fighter

When I say Street Fighter 6 feels different, it’s by no means because the game forgets its roots. What made Street Fighter 2 a legend back then also pulsates in every vein of Street Fighter 6: Ryu also blithely fires his Hadokens here, links light kicks and punches with powerful Shoryuken uppercuts – it simply plays grippy, massive, precise as ever. The game also looks great, Jaime’s kicking animations like an effects whirlwind, the hip-hop soundtrack is the best in years and Street Fighter 6 finds the perfect middle ground of comic book look and serious fighter with absolute aptitude and style.

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Each character differs drastically in its possibilities – this starts with normal attacks, but extends to completely own play styles. Newcomer Jamie, for example, slurps from his bottle after every manoeuvre – this would definitely fail his driving test, but the bottle presents me with cool tactical challenges: The more Jamie slurps, the more powerful he becomes, so ideally I need to survive the fight up to that point.

And if you’re new, the game helps you out more than ever: Street Fighter 6 offers an optional simplified button layout that takes the more complicated moves off your hands. Then the Hadoken flies without you having to turn the stick and so on. Other fighting games have been experimenting with such systems for years – and I think it’s a good thing: if you really want to master Street Fighter 6, you’ll have to switch to the classic layout at some point anyway, but for beginners, the system lowers the inhibition threshold.

And as we all know, the more people who play fighting games, the better the world is.

Reason 2: The new drive system

Every new Street Fighter has some kind of new bars or ledges. And hey, I love bars almost as much as pie charts, but Street Fighter 6’s Drive system has it all either way: every fighter starts every match with six small, filled bars. These bars affect almost everything in the game.

When I block, I lose bars. If I parry, fire out particularly strong EX manoeuvres or sprint forward, I lose bars. And I know, losing bars all the time doesn’t sound cool, but this drive bar allows for some really cool considerations.

For example, I can parry as many attacks as I want effortlessly as long as I have the bars to do so. I can also unleash what’s called a Drive Impact, effectively a focus attack from Street Fighter 4 that gives the enemy a resounding slap in the face even if I take a hit along the way. But that drive impact can in turn be countered with another one, and so on.

I’m going to cut this a bit short because otherwise I’ll bore you with too many technical details: This new drive system is not just a nice bonus, but has a decisive influence on the course of a fight. If you empty all six bars, you can no longer use various attacks and suffer massive disadvantages, because the drive gauge regenerates only slowly. Most tactical decisions in the heat of battle now have to do with these drive bars: I can parry enemy attacks, but if the enemy smells a fuse and catches me right after the parry, it costs me a hell of a lot of energy. Every advantage carries risks, every disadvantage chances for a comeback.

I’m sure many people will think the power of this new drive system is goofy. But I have so much desire to experiment with this new kind of Street Fighter because it makes the fights play dynamically in a completely different way than they did in Street Fighter 4 and 5 – and hey, that’s what a good sequel is about.

Editor’s Verdict

Sometimes I think the story really does go in circles. Six years ago I sat in the preview event for Street Fighter 5 and here too the big innovation was a bar. No wonder, bars are great after all, they hold attics together, censor nudie speedsters, but this very specific V-bar from Street Fighter 5 was quite difficult to understand. Street Fighter 6 learns from this challenge, as the drive system is child’s play to understand, but – as it should be – hard to master.

Only I don’t want to get too technical here, because I know many GlobalESportNews fans consume fighting games like I do without a stopwatch and training schedule. Street Fighter 6 has reignited my fire for fighting games after quite a while. To tell the truth, I’m installing the fifth part right now because I’m so keen again to set the arena on fire with Chun-Li, Ryu and co. With its soundtrack, its look, its fighting feeling and its new ideas, Street Fighter 6 seems absolutely spot-on like what I want after the disastrous launch of Street Fighter 5.

But that’s where the rub comes in: As good as it plays, I remain sceptical that Street Fighter 6’s release package will repeat the mistakes of its predecessor. Yes, the new story mode is supposed to be in at launch, yes, Capcom promises a lush fighter roster, but I’ve already been promised a lot. At its core, the game already fights outstandingly, but the release scope will decide how long the fire burns.