Street Fighter 6 Review (Gravelord)
It's awesome. I played the daylights out of SFIV but basically skipped V entirely and didn't play fighting games for years. Watching the 2024 EVO championship inspired me to get back into the genre and SF 6 was the logical choice. World Tour is fun and pretty chill for the most part. Just keep in mind you are the only person in the entire world who can use items during a fight and it's designed with that in mind. You may be level 35 and you are fighting another level 35 character but they will destroy you 1v1. Point being, use your items in the middle of the fight! Seems like some players are missing that part.
Modern controls have a damage penalty for specials and the auto-combos, but new players can use Modern to learn how the pacing and timing of the game works before going into Classic. Online works great, I'm using cross play and have had no problems. You may want to use the Confirm Match option just in case you get a player with a terrible connection, though. Casual fights are a free for all, just like walking into an arcade 30 years ago. You will face "New challengers" that fight like they are Master rank, or heck maybe just fight a legit Master rank. That's the arcade experience right there! If you want equal footing you need to play Ranked matches. Again, it's something I've seen people complain about. Ranked is ranked, everything else is open to whatever may come.
Last thing I see people criticize is the DLC seasons. While I agree it seems a bit much, we all have to remember that there was a time when you bought SFII on SNES, then had to shill out for a whole new game to get SFII Turbo, then yet again pay out for Super SFII. As far as I'm concerned, this system is better. Keep in mind that if you had vanilla SF6 and your friend had "Super SF6" then playing against each other online would either be a massive headache for the developers or maybe just not possible. Seasons give us big, major updates while keeping that core game the same and thus compatibility is never an issue.
Overall I'm having a blast getting back into the genre with SF6. I suck at this game, of course. But as a casual player with a terrible rank and not a lot of time to get better, SF6 has given me about 50 hours so far of constant fun and I am only halfway through World tour and I honestly think there are 4-5 characters I have literally not even played once as. There's a lot to love here and the minor gripes I do have (why are the rewards for each season so worthless?) don't really effect my overall enjoyment. If you're on the fence wait for a sale and go for it!