Street Fighter 5 wants you to have fun. It is fully aware of just how much giddy, gratifying, intelligent, enriching enjoyment it contains, and its primary instinct is to deliver that to you, as quickly and directly as possible, at whatever level you want to play.
Whichever end of the fighting game skill spectrum you currently stand on, do not take that to mean that Street Fighter 5 has been dumbed down. Hardcore, high-level players will find a vast amount of depth, nuance, and long-term malleability in its bold, immediate systems. And the less expert have a very long and exhilarating road of growth, improvement, learning and discovery ahead of them. The difference this time is that the clarity of Street Fighter 5’s systems and presentation has been tuned to near perfection.
Before a single punch has even been thrown, Street Fighter 5’s disdain for overly complex barriers is obvious. Gone is Street Fighter 4’s Focus Attack system, most crucially. The mechanic was intended as a get-out-of-jail free card in hairy situations, allowing hits to be safely absorbed and counter-attacked, but its secondary use as the primary means of setting up SF4’s most powerful, showboating combos ultimately gated away the fun of the higher-end game from all but the most dedicated and dexterous. In its place – literally, activated by the same, simple two-button press – is the V-Skill. Or rather, the many V-Skills. Because instead of bottlenecking creative play via a very specific route, a la its predecessor, the V system initiates the open, utterly freeform, ‘anything can happen’ play that Street Fighter 5 revels in.
Asymmetry is Street Fighter 5’s thing, you see. Asymmetry, and unpredictability, and dynamism, and creativity. The basics of attack, evasion, controlling space and stringing together combos come packing enough malleability to keep you going and growing for months – and probably years - but when you want to crank up both the flashiness and the fun, the tools to do so are a simple button tap away.
The perfect fighting game then? Unfortunately no. Because there’s a rather frustrating irony in Street Fighter 5’s launch day set-up. You see, while the core game is a wonderful, player-minded blend of immediate enjoyment and friendly, long-term lessons, the current content array of does not get that across terribly well. Not for the solitary player, anyway. While couch-based vs. play against another human will always be the best way to enjoy a fighter, in these post-Mortal Kombat X days, a strong, inventive suite of solo options is a must-have in terms of easing a player in. And Street Fighter 5, currently at least, does not have one.
Get past the baffling lack of a traditional arcade mode, and you’ll find only story and survival set-ups, alongside an unguided training mode featuring customisable AI. Story initially seems promising, but ultimately feels like a half-baked afterthought, delivering only two to four, challenge-free, single-round fights per character, strung together with rather cheap-looking and uneventful motion comics. Street Fighter certainly has the personality to make the idea sing.
Street Fighter 5 is brilliant with caveats. But it is, at its core, still brilliant. Being brutally honest, your mileage with it – during the early phase of its life at least – will vary greatly depending on the availability of fight-ready friends in your immediate vicinity. Its pleasures are great and many, but for all of their eagerness to please, you’ll really need to explore them shoulder-to-shoulder with others. That, of course, is why the heart of any great fighting game truly beats, and Street Fighter 5’s beats as hard and loud as that of any you care to mention. As such, it would be a real shame if the curious new players it has so much to offer were turned off by its limited early content. 

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