BY AMIT BARAN ROY | Street Fighter V on PC is fun and engrossing only if you are ready to accept the game as it is. But that is not the case for most of the fans who waited so eagerly until February 16. The latest entry in the legendary fighting franchise, Street Fighter V, has been a victim of the sell-first-fix-later strategy which is predominant among the gaming industries right now. I fail to understand this strategy as I have always been a believer of a bug free and complete game release (like the old times), even if it suffers a few delays. What is more annoying is that even after running the game through a lot of Beta sessions, Capcom failed to fix those errors that kept affecting the players at launch. Here is a article from our side that may help some players in their initial issues. Apart from the irritating server issues that infuriated the fans at launch, the offline mode that we get is in a mere barebone stage. The game is not even complete and I really wonder what nice profit Capcom thought of making by this broken launch. Are they really unaware of the fate that Warner Bros.’ ‘Arkham knight’ suffered?

“We wanted the game to look like a moving painting”

Said by Capcom’s associate producer Peter Rosas. Indeed, out of all these troubling issues, Capcom has done this thing right and should be appreciated. The game has flamboyant graphics, much better and improved than ‘Street Fighter IV’ or ‘Street Fighter X Tekken’. Thanks to Unreal Engine 4. The usual cartoon characters that we used to play with till now has received vibrant 3D effects and character modelling. The stage art, stunning lightning and cinematic effects during the critical attacks and the marvelous color combinations between the characters and their backgrounds, makes this side-scroller fighting gameplay effectively intriguing. Having said that, this comes at a price too. The graphics lacks good optimization which bottlenecks the gameplay as soon as FPS drops below 60. Due to the poorly optimized graphics, it makes almost impossible for low end PC gamers to enjoy the real fun of the game. Moreover, the game being FPS locked causes the terrible issue of slow motion gameplay during the singleplayer mode. So, I would suggest upgrading your rig to the recommended GPU before trying this game. This again proves Capcom’s lack of affinity towards PC users (utterly disappointing) which has been a hot topic recently.

“Street Fighter V is a discouragement for Beginners”-As said above, the game lacks quality in-game content and interesting game modes that can bind together players for hours, especially newbies. The game starts with a short comic book style introductory story followed by a lame tutorial. The tutorial only teaches some basic movements and attacks. Players can get to experience the newly introduced ‘V’ gauge bar and its associated V-skills, V-triggers and V-reversals and that’s it! This is disappointing as a beginner because it can become really annoying to master critical and special attacks with the perfect timing without any separate in game tutorial mode. Though experts can just start enjoying the immersive battles, beginners may need to work a lot to grow to that level. Moreover, this game is just not ready if you are thinking to play it alone. The single player mode consists of a ridiculous story mode where you get to play 2 to 4 matches with a backstory for each character. Surprisingly, each match can get over in seconds depending on your previous experience with Street Fighter. Making long story short, the story mode is very short and simple. Remaining is the survival mode which is not good either. Pretty much easy stages for every character with fixed opponents, even in the ‘hell’ mode. There is a training mode too where you can practice your timing of attacks and improve your skills. If proper settings are done, one can somehow get an experience of playing with the CPU (unfortunately there is no official ‘Best of 3’ CPU mode).

The online mode is the most essential feature of Street Fighter V as it is with every other community based game. But, ruinous server issues had led to a miserable launch day and it still continues today. Though, Capcom has managed to improve much of the matchmaking issues, yet when the server is down, it is really down. Whats more, when the world is enjoying Mortal Combat X’s exceptional online mode with lots of spectators and multiple players around, Street Fighter V allows only one other player in the lobby. Hence, it is baffling to think what did Capcom really expected out of this game which is buggy and the most barebones. Right now, only local competitive play with friends is the only good thing about this game. Hence comes the point, is the game really worth buying at this stage?

Moving on to more frustrating aspects of the game, Street Fighter V has launched with only 16 characters. I cannot believe this strategy. Capcom what do you want? Limited number of fighters is a big issue in this game. ‘Street Fighter X Tekken’ had nearly 5 times of this. Funny part was when I couldn’t find one of my favorite fighter 'Juri' at the fighter choice menu and only learned that Capcom has included her and several others in its official DLC schedule which will run till year end. Capcom are you kidding me? I can better call this game as ‘Street Fighter V Early access’ then? I feel like Capcom has carefully analyzed strategies to maximize their profit by these paid DLC’s (DLC pass costs $29.99) which unlocks a single character each month. But hey, it doesn’t work like that and we are no sheep. Not only this, the game also includes microtransactions where each dollar can earn you fight money to buy DLC characters and costumes.

THE PROGNOSIS

I see its pointless dragging on with the issues of the game as I feel even Capcom themselves has lost interests with the game (atleast for the PC version). There has been no official patch updates yet nor any comforting announcements, and all we can do is only wait and wait. Though, online mode has been improving since launch day and that may be relaxing to some extent. But anybody who doesn’t care about these issues will feel that the game in itself is very good. Immersive battles with enhanced critical attacks, the ‘V’ system replacing the focus attacks from Street Fighter IV and the exuberant graphics makes this game special. Key combinations are now much less complex than its predecessors and its more easy to perform the special arts. The bottomline being if you are a die hard Street Fighter fan and can live with all the limitations of the game, this game is for you right away. But its not foolish either to wait for few more days until Capcom does some serious updates to this game with more in game content coming by June.