Street Fighter V review: Definitely good, definitely unfinished

With each new Street Fighter game comes an intense amount of scrutiny from fighting-game fans who are eager to see how new characters and mechanics have shaken up the world’s most popular quarter-circle-motion fisticuffs series. That scrutiny only intensifies in the case of a big, fat number bump. This isn’t just the “Super Ultra Turbo Chibi-Sumo Edition,” this here’s one louder, isn’t it?

Street Fighter V will certainly have fans talking, what with its new “V-Trigger” system and other noticeable tweaks throughout its roster of old favorites, peculiar returners, and weird new brawlers. But for the first time in a new-number Street Fighter game, people will almost certainly talk more about what’s missing.

Capcom has advertised this as the first, last, and only retail edition for Street Fighter V—meaning, the game will supposedly live on as a constantly updated service, complete with free balance patches, free mode updates, and not-quite-free content purchase options. What Capcom hasn’t advertised is the fact that the game, as it’s launching on Tuesday, is already in desperate need of those updates.

There is good news. The game’s 16 thoughtfully designed fighters are all unlocked and ready to trade blows the moment you boot it up. Their combat takes place within a smooth fighting engine worth recommending, too. The trouble is, nearly every single thing currently surrounding that engine should be covered in those tacky, animated “under construction” GIFs.

Kick, punch, it’s all in the mind

It’s been nearly eight years since Street Fighter IV launched with a major shake-up to series fundamentals. This “fifth” game (if we’re not counting special editions, crossovers, or spin-offs, of course) doesn’t look as dramatically different at first kick-to-the-face blush, but its changes are equal parts subtle and ground-shifting.

Core combat continues to revolve around two-dimensional movement and a six-button attack array (three punches, three kicks, split between different attack speeds). Characters can still pull off “special” moves with joystick motions made famous in 1992: quarter-circles, Z-motions, backward charges, and 360-degree rotations. And just as in recent Street Fighter games, this entry includes an “EX” meter that grows over the course of a match; you can spend part of the meter on souped-up special attacks (like a more powerful “Shoryuken” uppercut) or blow the entire meter on a crazy-powerful attack (like an action-pausing, screen-filling flurry of kicks).

SFIV included a second “revenge” meter in its Ultra Combo system, but that has been yanked and so has the “focus” attack system which players could use to absorb and react to attacks. In their place is a new “V-Trigger” meter. Don’t be fooled by thinking Capcom’s just throwing special meters all over the place; this one’s a doozy. V-Trigger can be activated after your character loses a little less than half of his or her health bar. For a few combatants, this means a quick, powerful attack (much like the prior game’s revenge meter), but for most fighters it just means becoming “super-charged” for roughly 12 seconds.

Unlike the one-shot combo attempts that Street Fighter players are used to from “meter” attacks, V-Trigger changes battle flow so that fighters who are down-but-not-out get a sustained boost to turn the tide. Capcom has also attached a lot of identity to each combatant’s V-Trigger abilities. The seemingly boring fist-trader Karin unlocks a bunch of nuanced moves once she’s in V mode, while stretchy, tricky Dhalsim has to spend all of his V-Trigger power on a huge fire attack.

Players can also trigger reversal attacks by spending some of their V-Trigger meter points at a perfect moment. Even here, Capcom has instituted some character-by-character nuance, as some fighters can earn and use more reversals than others in a single round.

I always liked the simplicity of the focus attack system—how clearly that “absorb-and-counter” idea communicated both its benefits and its vulnerabilities. While I’m not a dedicated Street Fighter tournament watcher, the maneuver didn’t seem to see much use at high-level events like December’s PlayStation Experience tournament or the annual EVO series. This game’s shift to a V-Trigger meter and its emphasis on character-specific subtleties, reads like Capcom wanted to bolster the way this game breaks down for super-competitive players (presumably adding even more wrinkles to every single showdown of various characters). Conversely, SFV does little to guide players by the hand through what’s in store—and that’s where its utterly lacking release state first feels noticeable.

Easy does it—as in, the entire game

The story mode is currently made up of frozen comic panels and spoken dialogue. Capcom promises a full “cinematic” story mode for the game to launch for free in June.

The game opens with a brief, dialogue-driven tutorial in which old pals Ryu and Ken spar whilst exchanging campily grunted dialogue (“The essence of the fist is the core of fighting!”). The tutorial seems tailored toward people who’ve never touched a game controller—press right to walk toward Ken, press up to jump, that sort of thing.

It ends by telling players how to activate that V-Trigger and hinting at each character having a range of powers available through said meter. However, it doesn’t even clarify what Ryu’s boost actually is. Does his speed go up? Does he get new attacks or become more powerful? Is his skin covered in electric-looking effects for a few seconds for funsies?

The game doesn’t answer those questions. SFV doesn’t come with a digital instruction manual, and the reviewer’s guide Capcom supplied to Ars Technica didn’t offer specific answers either. For now, we’re not confident that even retail copies of the game will offer more nitty-gritty V-Trigger details. There’s also no training mode beyond the lazy, expected option of facing off against a dummy character and pausing to check the special-attack list.

Should players want to practice against the computer or sink their teeth into a meaty single-player mode, they’re out of luck. SFV comes with a “story” mode that offers two to four single-round fights per character, interspersed with corny dialogue and semi-sensical plot explanations. The difficulty cannot be adjusted in this story mode; SFV appears to default to an equivalent of Street Fighter IV‘s “very easy” difficulty.

That’s a pretty gaping hole for a game whose online community will crush new players with all manner of Street Fighter fluency. Did Capcom at least offer new players a traditional arcade mode? Nope. Maybe a range of challenges, or team-based battles, or tournament options? Nuh-uh. The only other option for single-player combat is a “survival” mode, an admittedly interesting solo combat twist that lets players bet accrued points to either refill their health bars between matches, add one-time boosts, or suffer the consequences in exchange for higher scores.

Yet even this mode doesn’t offer difficulty sliders. Players can only pick how many fights the survival mode takes to win, and though they’re labeled “easy” (10 fights in a row), “normal,” “hard,” and “hell” (100 fights), they offer opponents of random idiocy, rarely rising above SFIV‘s “medium” slider of defensive maneuvers and general tactics.

That’s it for now, solo gamers: story and survival. The menu teases a “challenges” mode, purportedly launching for free in March, which our reviewer’s guide describes as a set of “tough combo challenges for every character.” A longer “cinematic story expansion” will allegedly launch for free in June. We’ve put out word to Capcom asking if we can ever expect a difficulty slider—really, we looked everywhere for one, even under the couch cushions—and we’ll update this review with any response.

In online modes, players have three options: “casual,” “ranked,” and “battle lounge.” The first two options work by dumping you into a matchmaking pool and connecting you to other combatants who’ve picked the same option; however, in these modes, players cannot pick their fighter before each fight. Instead, they must go into a separate menu and pick a “favorite fighter,” which can’t be changed between fights without quitting out of a matchmaking search. During the game’s pre-release period, in spite of an apparently large number of online players (based on the game’s visual heatmap of real-world players), our shortest wait time between matches was 60 seconds. Wait times averaged closer to 90 seconds a pop—which made us wish we had a “rematch last opponent” option in either ranked or casual play instead of always getting disconnected and waiting.

“Battle lounge,” conversely, is where you might expect more flexibility, but you only get a little bit. Namely, you can choose different numbers of rounds, and you can turn on the ability to pick a new combatant before each fight. You can’t set up tournaments or other major rule-change scenarios. More glaringly, you can’t set up a lobby for other friends or players to hang out in, watch current matches, and line up arcade-style to take on the winner. Capcom promises a boost to eight-player lounges in its free March update, but it hasn’t promised any other features or twists for online play.

We didn’t want those hours of progress and coins, anyway

In all of the online matchmaking modes, however, you’ll want to toggle an option to choose opponents with an equal bandwidth rating. Unlike prior online Street Fighter games, SFV absolutely drops the ball on optimizing its netcode in the face of lag.

In past games, online matches against HPBs would result in a match slowing down so that both clients’ combat could be equally refreshed. Not so in SFV. Until I changed my in-game online settings, I found myself in a number of fights where my opponent’s character warped around the screen while mine moved at a normal pace. This meant the game would incorrectly predict major amounts of movement data and then update me with surprise teleported kicks to the back of the head. For a series that once proudly advertised its use of GGPO optimization, this development proved quite disappointing. I’m glad there’s an option to seek higher-bandwidth opponents, but it’s no guarantee that their performance will be up to snuff. I still saw some minor stuttering even in “high-speed” connection matches.

This may all be due to Capcom trying out a first for the series: cross-platform play between PlayStation 4 consoles and Windows PCs. The cross-platform play seems to be working as expected, at least, as we happened upon two players labeled as “PC” during the weekend review period and had no connectivity issues with either of them.

Consequently, since the game runs on at least one platform without the PlayStation Network, you’ll need to use Capcom’s own “friend” system to find and add friends to your personal SFV online-battling list (thankfully, this only requires a game-specific username). Capcom doesn’t ask for any e-mail address or password to confirm an account, however… and that’s a problem.

During the three-day-long review period, Capcom erased our game-specific account three times without any notice, asking users to pick a new username as if we were brand-new players. Hopefully this is just an artifact of pre-release server testing, but the experience certainly didn’t give us confidence in the ad hoc system.

Those frequent resets weren’t just a matter of seeing our online win-loss records wiped, either. Street Fighter V sees Capcom toying with a new microtransaction system that “rewards” its most dedicated players with “fight money.” As of right now, those points, and all the progress it takes to earn them, are attached to that game-specific account.

The game’s shop works similarly to the likes of Riot Games’ League of Legends, meaning players can purchase new characters (which haven’t yet launched) by either spending actual cash or by accruing this in-game currency for accomplishing tasks. Each new fighter will cost $6, Capcom says, or players can spend 100,000 FM. Meanwhile, when new cosmetic character outfits roll out, some will require spending FM to use and others will require spending real-life cash.

In some ways, FM is easy to acquire. After running through all the super-easy story mode content, we had 160,000 FM in all (10,000 per character). We scored an additional 10,000 FM or more by beating each “difficulty” of survival mode. However, FM accrued in online matches is a lot slower—as in, about 50 FM per match won and no FM for lost matches. Ultimately, that first 200,000 should be breezy enough; getting free content beyond that will take a lot of work… and some reliable servers.

Grinding for FM is bad enough, but the thought of spending hours on such a grind and having it all lost because Capcom couldn’t link progress to a backed-up username/password system is pretty horrifying. Until we see substantial credentials attached to SFV accounts, we’re not too confident trying to rack up FM or investing too much in our online win/loss records. We can only hope there will be a more robust system in place by the time cash purchases are activated in March.

Hey, Dead or Alive: There’s a new boob in town

A screenshot of the game in action, complete with its GUI.

At least the game looks great. Our review copy of the PS4 build hums at a crisp 60 frames per second with fluid character animations, tantalizing light and shadow effects, and mostly great details on the characters. Some of the hair dangles around weirdly, however, which is particularly noticeable since Capcom emphasizes long hair on the designs of a few characters. (I’m also bummed about this Street Fighter entry having so many disproportionate, spherical, gravity-defying breasts on its female characters. Can’t the fighting game industry leave that nonsense to the Dead or Alive series?)

Since we’ve only played the game on PS4 ahead of its retail launch, our impressions of the game’s performance on PC will have to wait—though we’re hopeful that its implementation of the Unreal Engine 4 translates well from console to computer. We’ll update this portion of the review when we have more information.

And for all the complaints we could level at SFV, character variety isn’t among them. “Only 16 characters” might seem like a worthy whine—especially since the final edition of SFIV came with a whopping 44 fighters—but SFV already runs the gamut between quick strikers and slower brawlers, not to mention close-combat bruisers facing off against long-range battle controllers. I spent hours with friends enjoying a boatload of good versus-battling time during the review period (even if we couldn’t toggle a local-tournament mode to track our stats, alas).

Stretchy-arms Dhalsim has been born anew with some new combo-building potential and an appealingly grizzled new art design, while Ken has been given some interesting speed and move tweaks—particularly in his spinning-kick attack, which can now be aimed in different directions. Those two join six other “classic” characters (Ryu, Chun-Li, Zangief, Cammy, Vega, and M. Bison). And while some of the series’ best will come back this year in the form of DLC, Blanka, E. Honda, and Sagat haven’t been announced.