Street Fighter 6 Review

Capcom spent the whole of Street Fighter V's life learning what it had broken, and Street Fighter 6 reads like every correction shipped at once. The Drive gauge is the centrepiece. One bar pays for the armoured Drive Impact, the movement cancel of Drive Rush, parries and reversals, so every defensive escape is borrowed against your own offence, and running the meter empty drops you into a burnout state that turns the next thirty seconds into a siege. It is the cleanest risk economy the series has built, legible from the first match and still arguable at the top level.

Modern controls do the other half of the work, handing newcomers specials on a single button at a real damage penalty, which is an honest trade rather than a training wheel. World Tour turns the tutorial into a role playing game across Metro City, and while its second half sags badly, it teaches spacing and matchup literacy to people who would never open a command list. Rollback netcode arrived working, which after the last game felt like an apology. The graffiti ink flourishes divide people. Almost nothing else here does.