Street Fighter 6 – the final preview: World Tour rounds out a genre-defining feature set

Street Fighter 6 may well be one of the greatest turn-arounds in gaming history. Cast your mind back to 2016, to the release of the deeply flawed Street Fighter 5. The bones of that package were pretty strong - but there also wasn’t much meat on them. In fact, if you didn’t want to play multiplayer, you were pretty much out of luck. It was a shocking, sloppy-feeling launch package.

SF5 did improve over the years. It’s nowhere near as good as SF4, but I find it to be an enjoyable experience with a good amount of content in all modes. But it took the developers years, and a leadership overhaul, to get there. And perhaps SF5 is what needed to happen to learn a few potent lessons. Those lessons have been fully embraced in Street Fighter 6.

Let’s be fair. I’ve talked about all of this before. I gushed about the game at a first limited hands-on, and then again later when the cast expanded. I’m one of only two fighting ame enthusiasts on VG247’s staff, too - and so I haven’t even been alone, with Connor also voicing his extreme excitement for SF6. But this most recent hands-on - the last before we’ll be downloading a final version of the game - is different.

It’s different because this beat never happened for Street Fighter 5. SF5 always looked pretty sharp pre-release - an interesting clay-ish art style, mechanics that initially appeared to evoke the SF3 series, and an interesting cast of newcomers and Alpha series veterans. But preview builds of SF5 hid the truly anemic state of the title’s single player offering from critics - and thus in many ways this hands-on was the ultimate test for SF6. The verdict? Well, it’s looking like a Perfect KO.

Time will tell, obviously - and some of you have likely already experienced some of what I did in the public demo. The build I played felt quite near to final, however, featuring several more missions of the single-player ‘World Tour’ mode, plus all eighteen of the launch roster available to play in the other modes.

We already know that SF6’s core combat is pretty sharp. I checked out everyone. Marisa is a surprise favorite for me, someone who usually picks small and fleety characters over muscled brawlers. Dhalsim is dirty, and is going to be a bloody nightmare online. Lily surprisingly bears far more of a resemblance to papa T. Hawk than I expected.

And my main, Cammy - well, I love her. She’s different in a way that means I’ve not clicked with her yet. A properly-changed main in a new fighting game should feel a bit like switching to a new car. The clutch has a different heft. You know how to operate it, but everything feels a bit wrong, a little more laboured. The timings are different, and it’ll take time to sink in. I look forward to hopping into the lab the minute I get the final game.

But, honestly, we knew barring a disaster that all this would be good. So what of World Tour? That’s where the rubber meets the road - and it’s where Capcom has shown the most bravery, with results that I reckon will play off.

If you’ve forgotten, in many ways Street Fighter 6 is two (or three, if you’re feeling silly in your generosity) games in one. One on side you have Fighting Ground and Battle Hub. Between them, these two modes make up some variation of pretty much all of the major feature pillars from SF4 and 5. If you want to play a simple arcade mode, with a ladder of fights, automobile dismantling mini-game, and vague-but-intriguing beginning and end story comics, that’s here. So is training mode, challenges, online, whacky bonus battle modes, and even some new features like some fascinating new ‘character guide’ teaching tools.

World Tour is where it’s at if you’re a more casual Street Fighter player, though. Years ago, before SF6 was announced, somebody described it to me as “like Mortal Kombat’s krypt meets Shenmue”. That seemed like a ridiculous description to me - tying together the unlock bonanza and lore feast of the krypt with a sort of open-ended adventure. I didn’t really believe the description. But, here we are - it was right!

I mean, say it quietly… but Street Fighter 6 is an RPG, actually. It’s got character levels, skill trees (of a sort), items, and random encounters in the street (of a sort). It has a lot in common with Yakuza or even Shenmue - but the genius is that it serves a dual purpose.

World Tour is viable and worthwhile on its own merits. But it’s also plainly a training tool for the ‘real deal’. Your created character starts out as a rookie, and over time will become a powerhouse fighter. They’ll do that by meeting the famous faces of the Street Fighter world, befriending and training with them in order to learn new skills. You’ll be able to equip stances and styles - so your created character becomes a little more distinct. Given that all battles take place in the classic Street Fighter fashion, the handy side-effect here is you’ll learn more about each character’s move set, portable knowledge that’ll transfer back to Battle Hub and Fighting Ground.

This is exactly the sort of training tool Street Fighter has always needed - and it’s a far neater solution for both teaching and a ‘story mode’ than Mortal Kombat’s lavish cinematic stories that are amazing to watch but don’t teach you much of anything. Playing further beyond the demo area, I embrace the chaos. I get into a fight with a burly level 27 enemy despite only being level 7, and try to have my fighting game know-how show me through. That fails, so I resort to chugging consumable healing and power-up items mid-battle to wear him down. It’s a heavy price, but once defeated, my level jumps as a result. Y’see? This is an RPG, in its way.

The world presented - just a free-roam Metro City in this chunk, but also represented by other countries and areas, some more limited than others - is colorful and inviting. It takes full advantage of one of Street Fighter’s greatest assets, which is its place as the centerpiece of a Marvel-style universe of connected games and casts going back over thirty years. Most omnipresent is Final Fight, but I very much expect to see Rival Schools and Slam Masters representation, too. The sad, sad side of me that actually enjoys Street Fighter lore is here for this.

While designed for the ‘modern’ control method on a controller, I was able to play World Tour on stick just fine. It was a mode where, if not for Capcom PR ready to pull the power cord the moment I reached the end of what I was allowed to see, I could’ve killed several more hours, happily.

That’s probably the greatest thing I can say, in fact. I’m not the target audience of World Tour at all, as I’m the sort of goblin who jumps into training mode or online and will be happy for months. But what Capcom offers here has a novelty and utility that’s enough to attract me - and therefore I expect newcomers or those less comfortable heading into the plague pit of ranked matches to have a blast. And maybe, just maybe, it’ll get them online-ready. If this can convert even one in ten people who otherwise might never have gone online, Capcom could be on to a huge winner.

So, yes - World Tour is impressive. Like the rest of Street Fighter 6, it seems a carefully considered and masterfully crafted response to the market and the loud criticisms of the last ten years or so. The only question that now remains is how tightly all of these elements get pulled together in the final game. If Capcom can stick the landing. I’m optimistic - and I’m more pumped than ever to find out - in a matter of weeks.