Pretty much every single fight ended with another player sending one of the stock replies the game lets you use: “I had a great time today,” or “that was fun,” or “thanks!”. Later, in the Battle Hub – a lobby that’s been realised like a big, old-fashioned arcade where you can line up at booths and engage in winner-stays-on games – things were more balanced trading wins and losses in equal measure. “Keep it up, your cross-up game needs work.” Later, this same player requested a fight with their secondary character – Juri – where I managed to land some meaty combos off, you guessed it, my improved cross-ups. “GGs,” one fighter – a particularly competent Guile – pinged me after I lost a set. Yet, in Street Fighter 6, everyone is lovely. Given the fact I have some personal information about my lifestyle represented by in-game cosmetics, some players have even called me slurs in the past. In past games, consistent losses and a complete decimation by the occasional perfect KO (don’t judge me) might have resulted in characters teabagging me, or glib messages over the in-game chat telling me to go to bed, since it’s past my bedtime. Have you played a 'Modern' 'gief yet? It's fun. So, over this past weekend, I have begun to lose more than I win – but I don’t mind, I want to get better, and losing is part of that battle. I can get beyond Bronze in the in-game ranking system, and then start to struggle against players that really know what they’re doing (and know how to keep Cammy and her Hooligan combination at bay, despite its new delay-based properties). I am, by no means, a very good Street Fighter player. It’s the most-played fighting game on Steam, ever, and it’s only been out a week.

Street Fighter 6 has no shortage of things to do.Īnd us hopeless fighting game dependents here at VG247 aren’t the only people that think this, either – take a casual look around the industry right now (past all the smoke and hellfire summoned by Diablo 4) and you’ll see that just about everyone is learning their half-circles, Dragon Punches and Drive Parry times, too. The incredible balancing of the fighting system, the well-considered comeback options, the weight with which you can punish whiffs, the variable and meaningful options open to even the most gimmicky characters… it’s Street Fighter at its peak, and a solid foundation for the next decade – if not decades – of the series’ life. Street Fighter 6 is something a bit special, isn’t it? As Alex mentioned in his Street Fighter 6 review, you can tell from the second you start to get your teeth into Capcom’s latest fighter that this, really, is an all-timer.

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