Play it on: PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Windows (Steam Deck OK)
Current goal: Finish the damn World Tour
Street Fighter 6 is great, no secret there: a real return to form. If you like fighting games at all you should definitely play it, perhaps even this weekend. I’m glad I FOMOed into buying it.
But it’s not perfect, and my main bummers are World Tour mode and the game’s F2P-style monetization. I totally get that the single-player, globetrotting, RPG-lite World Tour mode is a key attraction for folks who don’t live and breathe fighting games, a clever method to pull in a new crowd. I just wish it was fun to play through too, and didn’t make you grind for hours upon hours to unlock each main character’s secondary costume.
I want those costumes, dig? Some are really great! But it’s either splash out for per-character DLC in an already 60-plus-dollar game or spend bored hours grinding World Tour. Putting it that way makes me consider that maybe my time is worth more than the cost of the DLC, but then the resentment fires back: I just paid full price, only to be nickel-and-dimed? Come on!
The most depressing part is that toiling away in World Tour to the exclusion of online play is actively making me fall behind players able to ignore that frippery and just focus on getting good at the real game. I feel like I’m in Street Fighter purgatory reading reams of inane dialogue and performing fetch quests for generic NPCs just so my Zangief can wear his classic duds.
It used to be a lot less annoying to unlock these things, but that’s the state of the modern game industry. I’m not surprised, just bummed. Thank you for being my therapist today. — Alexandra Hall