This note is a continuation of the first part of my analysis of the impressive Street Fighter 6.
MORE OF THE SAME EVER. ALWAYS BETTER
As I had mentioned in the previous part, Street Fighter 6 It is divided into 3 large parts, well differentiated from one another. The World Tour mode, which we talked about at length before, Battle Hub and Fighting Ground, modes that we will deal with now.
fighting ground It would be the classic game mode, where we fight in hand-to-hand combat using the official fighters designed for the game. On the one hand, the eight original fighters of the first return Street Fighter: Ken, Ryu, Honda, Zangief, Chun-Li, Dhalsim, Blanka, and Guile. We also have another appearance of two legends born in super street fighter 2: Cammy and DeeJay. He also returns Juri once more, inevitable since her first appearance in Street Fighter 4. And as I mentioned in the previous note, this time the main protagonist is Luke, who had been added as the last DLC of Street Fighter 5, almost 6 years after the release of that game. Incredible.
The new fighters that this version brings are Jamie (Hong Kong), who fights using a style that mixes breakdancing movements with the martial art known as “El Mono Borracho”, Marisa (Italy), a mass of two and a half meters of pure muscle, gladiator in the Roman Colosseum and who uses her extreme strength to split your tangerine into wedges, Lily (Mexico) a young girl who fights with the help of the spirits of nature and who seems to have some relationship with Thunderhawk, Manon (France), a woman with impressive physical prowess, who fights using grappling movements combined with classical dance, Kimberly (United States), a young African-American woman with movements worthy of a true ninja, who is investigating the disappearance of her father and whose main JP (Russia) is suspected, the last new character for now, and who seems to be the baddest new bad guy in the saga, with the intention of creating a new terrorist organization similar to Shadaloo.
fighting ground It is divided, in turn, into multiple other options. On the one hand there is the Arcade mode, where we play the personal story of each of the characters. This mode can be set to just 5 or 12 fights, and has a couple of bonus rounds in between. There are two types of bonus rounds and both are very good. On the one hand, we have to destroy a truck with blows, as well as that classic car in the first games; on the other, we have to reject a series of basketballs that a person throws at us, using only air strikes. The truth is that they are both very entertaining. One of the best things about Arcade mode is that, as we play, we will unlock hundreds of official illustrations from different well-known artists, which reflect the entire history of the saga from its beginnings, and which we can then view whenever we want. in a crowded gallery.
The mode Training it is also very complete. We will not only be able to learn to control the characters, but we will even have explanatory videos of the strengths and weaknesses of each one and tutorials of the best combos that we can perform.
He Versus It is the simple combat, both against the machine and against another player. The novelty in this section is that now we can even opt for fights between teams, of up to 3 members each.
Another strong point within Fighting Ground is the mode of extreme battle. It works basically like the Versus mode but the fights have conditions…extreme. During each battle, in addition to taking care of our rival’s attacks, we must take into account other factors that can unbalance the fight. On the one hand, they can be dangers that affect our life bar, such as explosives that fall randomly on the screen, bulls that run past and bump into us, or bars that electrocute us. The nicest thing is that we can even combine these dangers with certain mandatory conditions to win the fight, such as having to knock down the opponent a certain number of times, only being able to do damage with certain movements or, for example, not being able to jump. The combination of various factors of choice really makes the fights really interesting.
Lastly, within the Fighting Ground is the classic online modeboth casual and ranked, in which we fight against other people using the official fighters of the game.
HELLO, DO YOU WANT TO BE MY FRIEND?
The last mode of Street Fighter 6 is the also new battle hub. This would be the online meeting mode between human players, using the avatars created for the World Tour.
The reality is that I did not have much time to test this mode before launch precisely because this mode was only enabled on June 1, one day before the launch to the general public.
Anyway, this mode is really promising. These are lobbies divided by regions in which we will be sharing and living with other players in their avatar forms. We can chat through an internal chat, fight against other players in our customized ways, also access the classic online mode with the official fighters through some arcade machines distributed around the place, make friends, participate in tournaments or events, join clubs or even play previous games in the series (I couldn’t try this last option but it is included in the Battle Hub features). So, as you will see, this mode is very interesting.
CONTROLS FOR ALL LEVELS
In a technological-gaming age where inclusion is at an all-time high, it comes as no surprise to anyone that Street Fighter 6 It has different accessibility options. On the one hand, it has 3 types of control: Classic, in which the characters are controlled with the same movements of a lifetime (doing the classic U forwards, U backwards, forward down forward and those herbs), Modern, limits the monuments to 4 loot, and allows us to perform autocombos and special hits with just one button (and which, curiously, is the default control of the game) and finally the Dynamic, which we can adapt according to our abilities.
the purists of Street Fighter may consider this a controversial decision, in fact I must confess that from the beginning it seemed somewhat queer that they would enable playing with combos and specials with a single button in a game with such a strong competitive component, but the reality is, at least on a personal level, I feel that this time they are trying to get people to play, to have fun and not to try to climb ranks in competitive modes. In fact, I really like getting trophies in games and this time they took out those related to reaching the highest leagues in online ranked mode, something that kept me from platinum in Street Fighter 5. I’m not bad at playing, of course, but to get to those ranks you have to be a real beast with thousands of hours invested and supernatural ability, someone I’m not.
Even the “fun competition” environment is so marked that the fighters enter a corridor before each fight, make gestures to the camera, we can make emotes with their faces on the pre-fight screens and we even have the possibility of activating a couple of commentators who recount the fight with astonishing precision and a great variety of phrases, so that we feel that we are directly participating in the EVO.
Also, now the game includes a new system called Drive. The Drive works with an energy bar that is located below our character’s life bar, and allows us to perform actions such as blows that are much more powerful, and can stun the opponent if he tries to block them or even be thrown against a wall, being at the mercy of our next move. It also allows us to perform a parry movement, which allows us to reject even special blows without any damage. The Drive bar is consumed with each use and then slowly recharges itself, but you have to use it carefully because if we empty it completely, we will enter a state known as Burnout, a kind of fatigue of the fighter, during which for several seconds we will be slower, we will do less damage and we will receive more, so it is not recommended to reach this point.
AND HOW DOES THIS LOOK AND HEAR?
Excellent. Capcom used the RE Engine as the game’s graphics engine, and we already know the quality of that engine. The characters look great, super colorful and wide, as we already know that the company likes to do lately. All of the Drive and Special moves look spectacular, with explosions of color and truly epic camera slowdowns. The best thing is when we perform a Critical Art, where the camera angles change, zoom in, zoom out and rotate while the opponent is taking damage.
The scenarios also look wonderful, full of moving elements in the backgrounds that also change their actions or positions during the fight. Gladiators and lions in the Roman Colosseum, people dancing in Jamaica or members of Mad Gear in Metro City, all have a life of their own in the background while the fight takes place in the foreground.
Music deserves a separate chapter. A mixture of rap and hip-hop songs that I personally find to sound very good, plus several reversions of songs from other games, such as Street Fighter 3. The reality is that the music had mixed reviews, there are people who consider that it is not conducive to this type of game, but I loved it and I think that it gives the title a unique personality that sets it apart from the rest of the saga.
THE BEST
- The new characters have charisma.
- Adaptability to any type of player.
- Fun and more relaxed than ever.
WORST
- The online is very hard from day one, word.
- That the pre-launch Battle Hub could not be tested a little more.
- That we don’t have YA YA YA DLC characters (haha).