REVIEW

Street Fighter V Review

by Sam Foxall, February 15th, 2016

Street Fighter V comes at an all-time high for fighting games, with the scene getting bigger almost every month as new fans flock to this sub-genre of competitive gaming. Capcom are very aware of this, building Street Fighter V as a platform for years to come, hoping to outlast the 7 year legacy set by Street Fighter 4 and build the 25 year old fighter into an eSport which can go toe to toe with the big boys. Seeing as this is the angle Capcom are going for, it is quite difficult to give SFV a traditional review, as it is clearly a game that is built for continual growth and expansion as its life cycle continues. In its current state it feels like the Early Access version of Street Fighter V, missing glaring game modes and having quite the limited online suite which is set to be added in March, with the Cinematic Story Mode coming in June. So, while this review will be getting a score, consider it a placeholder until the ‘full release’ of SFV in June.

The main thing that you need to keep in mind if you are coming to Street Fighter V as a casual player of the series is that the current February launch is a skeleton, missing some vital organs to make the whole piece complete. What you essentially get when you buy SFV is Training Mode, your typical online suite of Ranked and Casual Matches, a Survival Mode and the most meagre of Story Mode. If you are here for a single player experience, Street Fighter V is not your game at the moment. Go buy Mortal Kombat X or wait till June because you will be sorely disappointed if you aren’t the type of person to play competitively. Even then, the Story and Survival Modes are just there to give you enough Fight Money to buy the first DLC character when he releases in March. Story Mode in its current form is a series of 3-5 fights, laced together with some clearly rushed artwork to give some semblance of a story. The anatomy of the characters are all off and the fights themselves are so easy, with the game even giving you a full EX and V-Trigger bar just to finish the fights as quick as you can. This and Survival, which has you defeating waves of opponents against the clock to unlock alt colours for your chosen fighter, are currently the only way to fight CPU opponents in Street Fighter V, besides setting one up in Training Mode.

So, the single player suite is utter rubbish at present but if you have bought the game on launch, that isn’t going to phase you really. As long as you have a Training Mode decked out with all the gear to research combos and simulate situations and a working Online Mode, you are in high heaven with Street Fighter V. Training Mode is a phenomenal bit of design, giving players who know what they are doing the ability to create any situation that they could possibly deal with. You can set recordings that playback moves so you can learn to counter specific attacks, you can set training dummies to do a certain attack on wakeup so you can experiment with what beats what and so on. The possibilities for creating the perfect training regime are endless and even as someone who has never really delved into that side of Street Fighter, I was getting so much mileage out of simulating attacks that were beating me online and finding the best way to get around them.

While veterans will jump right into this with no problem whatsoever, new players will be blinded by science when they enter Training Mode for the first time. This is a continual problem I have with most mainstream fighting games is that outside of a barebones tutorial which teaches you the absolute raw basics, you are on your own from that point on. I hope this is added to in later content updates but there needs to be a series of in game videos or something to instruct players on how to get the best out of all the settings that Training Mode has to offer. Just a little nudge or guidance to push newbies in the right direction would stop so many brand new players from switching off and quitting.

You’ll be very familiar with this screen as you continue your Street Fighter V career.

I can’t say a whole lot about the depth of Street Fighter V’s combat as it’s only just been released and it takes years for a proper metagame to develop around the new system, I would say it is much easier to get into for new players, while giving veterans enough complex tools to create super flashy and damaging stuff. One frame links (which were instances where players had 1/60th of a second to input a specific move to continue a combo) are gone, with the fastest frame window now being 3 frames. Special moves feel easier to input and the overall barrier to entry seems lowered enough as to let new players jump in and start throwing fireballs with no trouble. You cannot be chipped out by specials or normals anymore, with only Critical Arts being able to deal enough chip damage to end your life. This means that blocking on one pixel of health may be the best option, but it also leaves you open to be thrown by your attacker. There are no Ultra Combos anymore, being replaced with Critical Arts which work like Supers do in other Street Fighter games. Basically, players can build up their Critical Art meter by performing special moves and dealing damage. You can then choose to either save this meter up to do a super powerful Critical Art or you can use little bits of the meter to do EX moves, which are enhanced versions of special moves. This may be giving a fireball a second hit, increasing the damage done by a special move or reducing its recovery, so you can act quicker out of it in order to block or follow up with another move. This is all very familiar to anyone who has played a previous Street Fighter post 3rd Strike but the brand new thing for SFV is the Variable System.

The Variable System is each character’s signature skill, giving them certain abilities which help each fighter feel unique. The system is broken down into V-Skills, V-Triggers and V-Reversals which are all tied to a V-Gauge, located above your Critical Art meter. V-Skills help you build up your gauge and can range from a parry which lets you negate the damage of attacks, a flip move which helps you dodge fireballs and get behind opponents, or even a way to levitate in mid-air to mess with enemies. Every character’s V-Skill is different and using them correctly helps build up the V-Gauge so you can use your V-Trigger. V-Triggers can be seen as your character’s trump card, something that can be activated to help swing the momentum back in your favour or to help you pile on the pain. For Ryu, his V-Trigger electrifies his fist which increases the amount of Stun done by his punches and fireballs. Dhalsim spits out a flame carpet which deals orange damage to your enemy’s lifebar which can be cashed out if you land a clean hit. Discovering V-Trigger combos and the right time to activate this special mode will be the place where SFV will get its real depth, giving veterans that place to really express themselves and show off their character. V-Reversals are similar to Alpha Counters from Street Fighter Alpha, where you can spend some V-Gauge to break out of a situation where you are forced to block. Micromanaging your Gauge will become vital at the high level, as you will have to make decisions between getting your attacker off your back or saving up for that massive damage combo to end the round.

You’ve been in Training Mode, you’ve learned your basic and super special V-Trigger combos and it’s time to go online. Again, as of writing, the only online modes are Ranked and Player Matches, along with the Battle Lounge. Ranked and Player Matches are like any other fighter, either giving you a place to fight for League Points to raise your ranking or a place to fight other players with no fear of losing your precious Points. Battle Lounge is the equivalent to Endless Lobbies from Street Fighter 4, allowing to host a room where players fight each other in sequence while spectating games in progress. At the moment, you can only have 2 players in a Lounge at a time, which kind of defeats the purpose of them, especially with them being temperamental to even get open. They will support up to 8 players soon after launch but no luck if you buy day 1. When you actually get one up, you can set certain battle conditions like making a set first to 10 wins which is a well-needed feature for people wanting to settle scores online. It’s very much like the rest of the game in that the core idea is great, but it is just lacking the extra bits and bobs to make it truly complete. The Capcom Fighters Network, Street Fighter V’s way of collating everybody’s fight information, is quite fiddly to click through on PS4 but does give you loads of data to check your replays, other players’ win/loss records and chart your improvement as a player. It’s like Training Mode; completely mind boggling at first but very helpful once you puzzle through its weird design quirks.

Trying to input, let alone combo into a Critical Art can be impossible on a dodgy connection.

The most important question for any online warrior though, is how good is Street Fighter V’s netcode? The answer is that it is phenomenal on solid connections but oh my god is it terrible if someone has spotty Internet. It feels like you are playing offline when someone’s connection is good but due to it being rollback netcode, everything turns into a complete clusterfuck if someone is playing on McDonald’s wifi. Attacks register while another player is on the other side of the screen, fighters warp in and out of position at random intervals and god help you if you are trying to play a high execution character as you simply cannot see what you are doing. Luckily, I’ve only had maybe 1 or 2 games of Slideshow Fighter V but when it does happen, either prepare for a laugh riot or just quit out to stop the madness. I won’t begrudge someone rage quitting an unplayable match.

Otherwise, the online is solid but suffers from being slow as hell to actually start a match. You cannot pick your character and stage independently when you start matchmaking, with players having to lock in their character and stage pick before going online which seems restrictive, especially if you are trying other fighters out in Player Matches. You have to sit through this obtrusive ‘Another Fight is Coming Your Way!’ screen whenever you do get a match, along with the usual ‘x versus y’ screen when you connect to the other player. This means that it takes about 1 minute for the match to actually start from finding another player, which starts to mount up as a lot of wasted time if you are playing a long session.

The presentation is solid overall, with fighters animating fluidly in combat and the stage backgrounds having that perfect mix of being goofy but not goofy enough to distract you from the action in the foreground. There is still the problem of necklaces and dangling bits of clothing clipping through character models but this is not going to make or break your experience of SFV. Ken’s hair does still look like bananas made of Play-Doh though, to the delight/dismay of many. The soundtrack is as good as it gets for a Capcom fighting game, with old school fighter themes getting fresh new remixes while new challengers get some absolute bangers. FANG’s theme is such a good track, even though I despise that character.

While it is low on starting content and suffers from being quite inhospitable to fresh faced brawlers, Street Fighter V does look like a promising start to a new era of fighting games. I think that the seasonal structure, based on MOBAs, will work well with a franchise which has become infamous for its Super Turbo Mega Hyper Remix editions and allow a cleaner way for the fighter to be updated along its life span. Dedicated members of the FGC will be able to see past the skeleton of a game that is here now and be happy to just have a new Street Fighter to play but I’d have brand new fans hold fire until at least March. While the base game is phenomenal to play, I would wait until stuff like Fighter Tips and Challenges are implemented next month. I will update this review with the new features when they are released but for now, this fight seems to be primarily for veteran World Warriors.