Street Fighter V Reviews
It's hard to criticize something that seems like it was tailor-made for a wannabe competitive player like me, but I just can't ignore how little Street Fighter 5 does for the average fighting game player. It sports a wonderful, diverse cast of characters, places a clear emphasis on strong fundamental play, it gives competitive players a great online experience, and it does it all while looking gorgeous. Strictly in terms of mechanics and competitive features, Street Fighter 5 is just about peerless, but it has quite a ways to go before it stacks up against other fighting games - including its own predecessor - in terms of overall content.
So, so good for the genre-savvy, but beginners be warned: Street Fighter V does nothing to help you grow as a player.
Street Fighter 5's brilliant combat is let down by a barebones launch and server trouble.
Street Fighter 5 is deep, endlessly fun, and immensely inviting, but local competitive play is currently the primary way to enjoy it.
Playing Street Fighter V is an outstanding experience, but the limited modes and infrastructure that binds them together stands on shaky ground
Street Fighter V is the skeleton of a great fighting game
Street Fighter 5 is missing essential elements, but its fighting engine is one of the best around.
Capcom moves the venerable series forward, but not without taking a couple steps back.
Street Fighter V delivers strong multiplayer competition but feels much emptier than previous entries in the franchise.
It's such a shame that Street Fighter V launched in the state it did; it's impossible to wholeheartedly recommend to everyone as a result. If you're on the fence or a newcomer, you're better off waiting for another update or two for the game to get fully fleshed out. But even right now, beyond all its rough edges and missing modes, Street Fighter V is a tremendous fighting game at the top of its class.
Hopefully, this botched launch doesn't put too many people off sticking around, because when Street Fighter is at its best – when you're learning, improving, competing and winning – there are very few games that even come close.
People who got into the fighting game community with Street Fighter IV may not want to hear this, but from a base design, Street Fighter V is by far the superior game. Capcom has paved over and smoothed out a lot of the things I didn't like about Street Fighter IV's design. A lot of those issues created poor play habits, which makes it feels like Capcom is making small steps to mature the game, and in turn is trying to mature how the player base plays fighting games.
It's hard to find fault with the bigger picture Capcom has in mind here and, assuming the online issues are dealt with quickly at launch and the rest of the game modes arrive as promised, this is looking like a perfect round.
Street Fighter 5 is the best fighting game your money can buy.
Overall, Street Fighter V is a thoroughly excellent game and one that Capcom intend to support for a good while to come. It is, however, an intensely involved beat-em-up, as well as a work in progress, and only time will tell if the online community will be able to support players unfamiliar with the series. If you are into your beat-em-ups though, then Street Fighter V definitely has you covered for the foreseeable future.
It's a shame that Street Fighter V currently suffers from a lack of content, because with free updates and patches, a legendary fighting game is waiting just below the surface. In a few months I hope we can look back on this tumultuous launch as an afterthought to the greatness I know that this game could hold.
Even as a person whose grasp of fighting games is nowhere near top-tier standard, Street Fighter V is the most fun I've had in a fighting game in years. It's a bold choice by Capcom to make this an expanding platform rather than a simpler game release, and it means that while it's light on content, you have to appraise its stability, core combat and look to its true form in the future. Based on the strangth of the gameplay and performance, Street Fighter V is a sublime fighting game and shows that this old dog still has some new tricks.
Street Fighter transforms itself from just a game to an entire entertainment platform of its own, or at least it will do once all the content is up and running.
Street Fighter V is a work-in-progress. The combat system stands as the game's strongest and most important pillar, which masks some of the minor imperfections with the graphical clipping and online performance. Having a console release now is understandably more important for the sake of the competitive community even if that comes at the cost of the single-player experience. However, asking for both a full single-player and multiplayer experience at launch should be the standard. The review score for the game will likely improve over the next three months as more content is added over the course of the year, but unfortunately, I can't grade what doesn't exist. Along with the new Hitman which will release episodically, Street Fighter V makes the case for rolling reviews as a necessary practice moving forward. So expect periodic updates to this review or as separate reviews as Street Fighter V develops over its lifespan.
In many ways Street Fighter V is unfinished, but as a platform, it has strong legs. If Capcom sticks to its word, this could have just as long of a lifespan as IV, if not more.