Summary
- Street Fighter 6 offers a user-friendly training mode with helpful features like Action Timing Display and customizable dummies to make practicing and learning the game easier for players of all skill levels.
- The replay functionality in Street Fighter 6 allows players to analyze their matches and improve their gameplay by watching replays and using tools like slow motion and viewing command inputs.
- Street Fighter 6 introduces a Battle Hub mode, a casual area for players of all skill levels to engage in online matches without affecting their rankings, creating a more relaxed and friendly environment for online play.
The fighting game genre has always been considered fairly niche because of how inaccessible it can seem, especially considering the mechanics of fighting games have come an extremely long way from the arcade days, with them now often being much more intricate and complex. This means there are many people who will dabble with a new fighting game without learning any combos or special moves and who will eventually abandon the game altogether after only a few weeks or even days of playing.
Capcom is well aware of this and has managed to achieve the seemingly impossible task of pleasing hardcore Street Fighter fans while also welcoming newcomers to the experience thanks to a few new features and modes that make an appearance in the newest title of this beloved series. Considering how many fighting games are coming out, there's never been a better time to be a fan of the genre. Moreover, due to how welcoming Street Fighter 6 is, the game is ideal for anyone who has ever been keen to get into fighting games but has previously been put off by the genre's complexities.
7 Training Settings
The training mode is a huge part of any fighting game, providing players with an area where they can try out new characters, experiment with a few combos, or even train against characters who they've struggled with in their matches, but rather than simply dropping players in a room without any guidance, Street Fighter 6 goes above and beyond to make every player, no matter their skill level, feel as comfortable as possible when practicing.
Not only can players see an Action Timing Display, which makes it far easier to land precise inputs, but they can also customize everything about the dummy and can even set them to a regular AI who will battle the player without the match ever ending, making for a fantastic way to train and become accustomed to the game without even having to worry about taking a loss. Pair this with the visible frame data and customizable music, and it makes for one of, if not the greatest training mode seen in a fighting game to date.
6 Replay Functionality
If players navigate to the multi-menu and head over to the Capcom Fighting Network tab, they will be able to watch replays of their matches in order to analyze where they might be going wrong in terms of certain moves and combos and what small actions might be impacting the result of their matches.
When watching a replay, there are a few different tools players can make use of to carefully observe everything that went on between them and their opponent, including being able to slow the footage down frame by frame and even being able to see what command inputs were being pressed by both players. Many fighting games will, unfortunately, skip the replay feature, but Capcom knows just how important it can be to the overall learning process and decided to make it a core feature of the game.
5 Character Difficulties
While it's only a small addition, being able to see how difficult each character is when selecting them goes a long way, considering it can be so easy in other games to pick up a cool-looking character only to find out that they are infinitely complex in their mechanics and gameplay, which can immediately drive a player away from the game if they think everyone is that difficult.
Guiding newcomers in this way makes the game so much more accessible and easy to pick up and play, and considering there's a nice range of characters for each difficulty level, it even means players can move up gradually as they become more accustomed to the controls and pacing of the game which helps to lean into the personal progression.
4 Battle Hub
Capcom made it clear in early trailers for Street Fighter 6 that they were focusing on building three distinct modes when developing the game, these being World Tour, Fighting Ground, and Battle Hub. The Fighting Ground is the standard online and offline experience that most fighting game fans will be used to, but the Battle Hub is something wildly different, with the player entering a room full of other fighters facing each other on the many arcade cabinets spread out across the arena.
When entering the Battle Hub for the first time, it's clear that this is designed to be a casual area for players of all skill levels to hang out, and considering the matches on the arcade cabinets aren't ranked and won't affect the score, it's a fantastic way to get some online experience in a much friendlier and more forgiving setting.
3 Drive Impact
By pressing the heavy kick and heavy punch buttons together, the player's character will use the Drive Impact move, which is a staggering attack that makes them near-invulnerable while charging it up. This is slightly similar to the Focus Attack in Street Fighter 4, but unlike that move which was extremely risky, the Drive Impact is very fast and requires extremely quick reflexes to counter.
When the Drive Impact lands, though, it stuns the opponent, leaving them wide open for a combo or special attack, meaning that it is more than capable of turning the tide of a match and granting new players the opportunity to try out a new combo by slowing the game down and offering them a free shot.
2 World Tour
After the lackluster story mode of Street Fighter 5, which wasn't even released until months after the game launched, many fans speculated that Capcom would just decide to focus on the core gameplay of the next game and not bother with crafting any sort of single player experience other than the arcade mode going forward, so it's fair to say people were shocked upon seeing a created character traveling through Metro City in one of the earliest Street Fighter 6 trailers.
In many ways, World Tour acts as the tutorial for the game, easing players into the combat and allowing them to learn each character's moves by learning from them and practicing their moves as part of their journey, but it also contains an entirely fleshed out story of its own, along with plenty of fun easter eggs and tons of shops which help to break up the fights and make the world feel truly alive and lived in.
1 Modern Controls
The introduction of the Modern Control scheme is going to be looked back on for many years as a turning point for fighting games as it allows anyone, even those who have never picked up a fighting game in their life, to be able to pick a character and go toe to toe with their friends, or even strangers online, without feeling like they are out of their depth.
What makes the Modern Controls special is that it makes performing otherwise difficult combos easy, allowing beginners to focus more on spacing, jumping, and their neutral game, which are often the more complex aspects of games. However, giving them this helping hand suddenly makes Street Fighter seem less intimidating than many of the previous entries in the series and is the biggest reason so many newcomers have flocked to the game.
Street Fighter 6 is available now on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC.