Street Fighter V Review (PC) 

  The launch of Street Fighter V was an unmitigated disaster. With my arcade stick hooked up and ready to go, I faced my first challenge on my road to becoming a world champion: getting past the User Agreement screen. The game would not respond to my joystick inputs, so figuring I had to pass the screen to get into an options menu and enable it, I tried using my keyboard to get past the legalese threshold guardian. The arrow keys worked, but hitting 'Enter' would not advance the game. I'm lucky enough to have a second arcade stick, so I plugged that in. No dice. The mouse fared no better, so I fell back on years of gaming experience and proceeded to press every key on the keyboard. Finally, I was making progress. Protip: it's 'B'.

  This was the first stumbling block in a comedy of errors. Turns out neither fight stick I own is supported even though Windows certainly recognizes them as functional. Bold move for a fighting game. Then I got to witness the joys of launch day server problems: they didn't work, either. Granted this is unfortunately common, but Street Fighter V is a game with next to no fallback plan for when the online portion is out of commission. There are a few (very few) single player options, but if you're not connected to Capcom's servers you're not earning “fight money”, the game's currency for buying future DLC characters and costumes. I say “future” because right now the Store option is blacked out, promising to open at a later date. So what that fight money is actually worth... who knows? The game isn't interested in telling you. It's not interested in telling you many things, actually...

  So, despite not racking up Capcom funny money, I decided to dive into the few options available to me, starting with the Story mode. You could easily confuse this to mean Arcade mode, but don't get your hopes up. What's on offer is almost hilariously awful. Almost. I've played enough fighting game stories at this point to appreciate some cheese, but Street Fighter V's Story Mode is offensively bad to the point I had to skip most of the “cutscenes”. And by “cutscenes”, I mean static, hand drawn illustrations that appear to drawn by a middle grade student who checked out a “How to Draw Anime” book from the library. It's bad, and the story and dialogue aren't much better. Each fighter is tasked to complete roughly three one round fights, starting with full meters, in what has to be the easiest of Easy difficulty settings with no option to tweak any settings. This mode lasted all of an hour.

  What caught my eye next was a Training mode that promised numerous different options to hone your skills. I adored the training mode in Street Fighter IV, so I was looking forward to hopping in and challenging myself to some combos. Nope. It's just a dummy AI mode where you can set the CPU to different states. No combo lists or actual training of any kind. There's not even a VS CPU mode, so all that was left on my plate was Survival, which is easily the strongest of the offline offerings. Here you fight through a set number of CPU opponents depending on your difficulty setting, and spend the points you earn through winning matches on “supplements” which range from health gains to offense, defense, and meter boosts. If you're trying to practice anything else besides health boosts kind of screw up the game, but it's better than nothing.

  Days later, the servers seem to be somewhat functional so I've been playing Survival mode with Fight Requests turned on... because there's not a whole lot else to do in the game. Every now and then I even get to fight online, and sometimes it's playable. For a test I set aside an hour to gauge my success: Ranked requests on, all platforms, regions, skill levels. In that hour, I had a whopping one match come up against a fine fighter named PoopyPoopFarts. To the game's credit the match was very smooth. After that hour, another fight popped, but it was laggy to the point of unplayability and got disconnected after about thirty seconds. Going into straight Ranked matchmaking is painful, staring at a spinning wheel for three to ten minutes on average, and about two thirds of those games ran very poorly as well.

  The core mechanics of Street Fighter V seem okay. I find them simple, but I'm not a hardcore fighting fanatic so any depth beyond generic strategies and spamming specials is lost on me, and it's too much to ask the game to actually teach you anything in-game, apparently. There are promises of a true Arcade mode, challenges, and loads of “free” content coming to Street Fighter V in the future, and who knows? Maybe this game will be a complete package someday down the line. As it is now, it feels rushed, unfinished, and outright broken in many cases. The problem with waiting for these updates is the game was released as a full priced product, and by the time those updates roll out there will be better, more complete games already released (there are already plenty), so I don't know who this game is for. Not me, anyway.