Capcom





Capcom























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?

Game Details Developer: Capcom

Publisher: Capcom

Platform: PS4 (reviewed), Windows

Release Date: February 16, 2016

Price: $60 / £45

ESRB Rating: T

Links: Steam | Official website Capcom: Capcom: PS4 (reviewed), WindowsFebruary 16, 2016: $60 / £45

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 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.

Listing image by Capcom