The legendary series that helped define a genre since 1987, the Street Fighter series has always remained one of the premier fighting games at arcades around the world, home consoles, and Esports events, even branching out into various other media. The brawling icons from Capcom have also duked it out with characters from several other franchises such as other Capcom titles, Marvel, Tatsunoko, Tekken, Super Smash Bros, and more. The series has seen its highs and lows, but its legacy has always remained strong. 2008’s Street Fighter IV was the resurgence the series needed, while 2016’s Street Fighter V was a major letdown, but Capcom aims to get things right with Street Fighter 6, now available on PlayStation 4|5, Xbox Series X|S, and PC.

After all the beta tests, location tests, and demos, Capcom really has taken on a ton of feedback from competitive players and casual fans to try to bring us the ideal Street Fighter experience. With returning legacy fighters, new faces entering the fray, refined gameplay, online play with rollback netcode, and various new features, Street Fighter 6 is going all out and not pulling any punches.
Beginning the game, players will already be spoiled for choice.

The main modes include World Tour, Battle Hub, and Fighting Ground, each of them packed with a ton of content. The different menu screens can be confusing to navigate at first and take some getting used to. Fighting Ground will be the most familiar to fighting game fans, as it includes Story Mode, a straight-forward and traditional arcade ladder with endings for each character, as well as Versus, Team Battle, Training, Tutorial, Extreme, and Online modes for ranked/casual matches and lobbies.

World Tour is an open world single player campaign with RPG elements, where you create your own Avatar, an original fighter with tons of different customisation options to experiment with, before hitting the streets, getting into fights, learning new moves from the main SF6 cast, and of course, fighting with them too. Players can explore various locations, collect items and money, buy new clothes, take on small jobs, and challenge almost anyone to a fight. It is bizarre being able to fight anyone, including shop vendors, old women, street performers, cops, and more without any consequences, but it’s no doubt hilarious, fun, and necessary to level up your Avatar.

Each location comes from different corners of the globe and offers so much for players to see and do, even meeting some long-forgotten characters from older Capcom titles. In a way, World Tour is also its own story mode and a chance to see the main cast from the third person. The story itself may not be groundbreaking, but it’s still fun seeing all the familiar faces and the different sides of their personalities. Players can spend up to 20 hours or more just exploring the world of Street Fighter like never before.

Battle Hub is where players use their Avatar from World Tour or create one if they haven’t already, to run around a virtual arcade and find opponents by sitting at one of many Street Fighter 6 arcade machines, recreating the experience of being in a real arcade. While exploring the Battle Hub, players also have a variety of taunts and actual character moves they learned from World Tour to play around with and interact with other players, creating some hilarious moments, like fighting each other using the moves they’ve acquired, just for fun. The Avatar designs other players have come up with have been very creative, even looking like characters from other games, while others are really quite a sight to behold, with their inhuman proportions.

There are also some shops to buy new clothes to customise your avatar, sign up for tournaments, photo booths, screens showing other players’ progress, and even an area to play classic Capcom games, and these change in rotation such as Street Fighter II, Final Fight, Magic Sword and more that will likely be included later. There is also an area called Extreme, which plays online matches with unique conditions such as an exploding ball or avoiding a charging bull. Overall, Battle Hub is the ideal online hangout where players can run around an arcade, socialise, meet some bizarre people, and start fights. Kind of like real life ironically. In my personal experience, the online play has been fantastic thanks to its rollback netcode. I’ve matched up with opponents from across the world, and for the most part, the online experience has been incredibly smooth, even with Australia’s not-so-fast internet.

Something unique to Street Fighter 6 not seen in other fighting games is being able to play on a different stage from your opponent. That means what you see may be different from what the opponent sees, despite playing in the exact same match. This really helps with players not wanting to be restricted to stages they don’t like, especially the most overused stage in Esports events, the dreaded Training Stage.

Actual fighting game commentators can even be selected in Japanese or English. They include Jeremy “Vicious” Lopez, Aru, James Chen, Tasty Steve, Kosuke Hiraiwa, Demon Kakka, Thea Trinidad, better known as WWE Superstar, Zelina Vega, JChenzor, and Hikaru Takahashi. It feels like they actually commentate as they do in real life without sounding repetitive, really adding to the atmosphere of the game even if they can only refer to the players as Player 1 or Player 2.

Street Fighter 6 brings back a lot of the best elements from past games, including the Parry System from Street Fighter III, and Focus Attack from Street Fighter IV, now known as Drive Impact. The Parry System has been highly requested since 1999, especially since it helped create the iconic Evo Moment #37. Street Fighter 6 has two different versions of the Parry System. Regular parry will deflect any attack except grabs, but it absorbs some of the Drive Meter, while the Perfect Parry requires very precise timing with the opponent’s attack, leaving them wide open for a counter. Drive Impact works very similarly to the old Focus Attack, this time absorbing up to three hits.

It has a real risk vs reward element, but if timed properly, can close the distance and counter the opponent, creating an opening to punish them. Every character has at least three Super Combos that can all be used in a match with enough Super Meter built up, unlike in some previous Street Fighter games that only allow one Super Combo to be selected before the match.

Capcom’s latest fighter has a very urban hip-hop feel, much like Street Fighter III did, and it seems to mesh really well with the overall design and presentation. The in-game graphics have received a major upgrade using the RE Engine. The characters look more realistic but still retain their iconic looks. The soundtrack has fresh new tunes for all fighters, but unfortunately, the returning characters’ themes are very different. They’re not terrible, but they aren’t as catchy as their more identifiable tracks.

Every returning fighter has also received updated designs, including Ryu, whose base design has always been his iconic white karate gi. All the updated designs perfectly suit each fighter and have a lot of meaning behind them, especially Ken, who gets a modern upgrade to his familiar scruffy blonde hair and ditches that banana-like hairdo from the previous game. The base roster includes 18 fighters to start with, which is small compared to other fighting games, but more are on their way via DLC. All the newcomers have unique and eye-catchy designs and moves, perfectly suiting their style and personality, except Luke.

Luke’s design just looks lame with him wearing street clothes and no shoes. He still isn’t well-liked by fans, despite Capcom’s attempt to make the MMA fighter the new face of the franchise, and his cocky and arrogant personality doesn’t help either. He’s the only character featured on the game cover, was the only one in the reveal trailer, is first on the select screen, the first in World Tour, and is heavily featured in promotional materials. It feels Capcom is trying way too hard to make Luke a fan favourite, but instead, making him more unlikable, while every other character, both new and old, have been received far better by fans. It’s highly unlikely that someone who seems to be trying so hard to fit in is gonna replace the nomadic world wandering warrior as the poster boy for Street Fighter.

Capcom has been doing an amazing job promoting this game and is clearly trying to make up for their shortcomings in past games, especially with the severe lack of content in Street Fighter V. The latest entry in the series is looking to make a huge impact, not just in fighting games, but the whole gaming industry. Capcom’s latest brawler is shaping up to be one of the best fighting games on modern consoles. Street Fighter 6 packs a punch and holds nothing back.

Written by: Sammy Hanson