I don't know what has gotten into me, I never was into Street Fighter, going back to the early nineties I always preferred MK and it's more realistic graphics. Until MK went 3D and looked ugly af. But as my grandfather used to say: I just couldn't leave it for that price.

And I have to admit I liked it more than I expected. The visual style is very nice. I don't think I saw any game that implemented the cartoony visual style with 3D graphics. Most games that tried "cell shading" or any other way to imitate a cartoon look with 3D graphics until now looked odd to me. It just didn't work.
But SFV I finally looks like it was meant to be like this. And I don't experience it as a negative thing.

I have to admit I was always rubbish with fighting games, and I'm probably even worse now. I was never able to memorize the combinations necessary to perform special moves, and even less able to perform them during a live fight. So my tactic always was and still is: bash the keys randomly and whatever comes out of it comes out of it.
And sometimes this work relatively well, I even can get in a few special moves accidentally. But when I want to do it on purpose? Never happened. I remember even back in the day when we tried to perform fatalities in MK, my character often just ended up acting like it had some sort of seizure and nothing happened like ever.

But that's probably just me. I have no short term memory. Hell I use a calculator not because I can't perform mathematics in my head, but because I can't remember the intermediate results for 2 seconds. And it's easier to just use a calculator than to write down the numbers. But I digress...

What I like about the game is that even basic moves are different for each character. They have different damage even, not just different styles for the moves. So playing a different character is a different experience entirely. I didn't play all of them but tried the ones that I liked. And some I immediately dumped because I didn't like their fighting style. So here there is more to the characters than looks. Which I have to admit played a major role in my choices. And while we're talking about looks there is nothing PC about this game. And that's a good thing. Whoever wants political correctness can go to an aa meeting or something similar. If a videogame offends you, then you don't play it end of story. So back to looks, the characters all have different styles and even sizes, but strangely size doesn't matter. Even the hitboxes of large characters is the same. But the reach of characters seemed different.

However what is a negative and related to style is that each character has only one single victory ceremony. And it is used over and over again after each fight. And since you have to do 8-10 fights in a row with the same character it really stands out. I know it costs money and time, but this is just laziness. I'd rather it only had half the characters in it but with more costumes and animations.

And that brings us to the elephant in the room: microtransactions. And it's bad. It almost ruins an otherwise pretty well made game, almost. There is nothing to say for it, the whole game is set up to have multiple season passes, and they're selling alternate outfits for real money, you can't just unlock those by playing the game. Hell as far as I can tell, the only thing you unlock by playing the game is concept art. It's just not right. We should stand up against this rather sooner than later.

And there is one more thing, the game is simply not playable with a keyboard. I've tried and failed. I ended up playing it with a ps4 controller, which is blasphemy, but what can the master race do, if all we get is a lazy console port?

According to some, the game includes a rootkit in it's copy protection, well I really hope that is not true. But it sure doesn't work if there is an active antivirus. So who knows? I won't put anything past videogame publishers these days, especially japanese ones

+

  • Graphics  
  • Visual style  
  • Characters  
  • Not trying to be pc  
  • great levels or I'd rather say backgrounds that live  

-

  • microtransactions and season passes  
  • lack of proper PC controls  
  • only a single victory celebration per character  
  • rootkit?
  • update reset my scores and stats  


Scoring card:

graphics/realization: 9/10
story/atmosphere: 5/10
gameplay/controls: 5/10

overall impression: 6/10

I know I said I liked it, but in comparison to other games even this is overrating it. I know you can't do an apples to apples comparison but still. This is not even mentionable on the same page as games like TLOU or Tomb Raider. There is much less value here, and if I'm honest much less effort from the developers as well. It would be like comparing a scooter to a car.
This is excellent for what it is, but not AAA game territory. I'd be hitting myself if I purchased this for $60 but for $8 it was an OK deal. In my initial enthusiasm I even purchased the first two season character packs as well. But I regret that now. Wouldn't have missed out on much. There is one character that I actually liked from them.