Street Fighter V Review

The fundamentals were never the problem. The three button special layout, the V system giving each character a personal comeback tool, and a slower deliberate neutral all made for a game the professional scene could work with, and by Champion Edition the roster was enormous and the balance was fine. What Capcom shipped in 2016 was not that game. There was no arcade mode, no proper story, a survival mode with no saving between rounds, a broken matchmaking service that spent launch week offline, and delay based netcode in a year when the alternative was well understood and widely requested.

The visual style is flatter and shinier than its predecessor, the character models look plastic, and the tone lurches between grim and cartoon without settling. Piecemeal fixes arrived over four years, and the game people defend today is a different product from the one that was sold. Judging a release by what it was on release day, this is a bad one.