Top positive review
5.0 out of 5 starsPerfect fight mechanics, incomplete but only as advertised, no bugs to speak of
Reviewed in the United States on February 21, 2016
I'm going to be a dissenting voice here, and probably catch a lot of crap for it...
First, some background. I remember playing SF2 in arcades back in 1991. At the local arcade, there was an SF1 machine that I played once or twice, and then I noticed elsewhere in the arcade, they'd just gotten SF2, which blew my mind. I remember picking Chun-li ("wow, you can pick characters now!?") and fought against Ryu, which seemed super strange to me, since you could only play as Ryu in the first one.
Fast forward a number of years and they came out with Super SF2 Turbo. This, to me, was absolutely ridiculous. I was thrilled when they announced it would be a 3DO exclusive, because I didn't want to have the temptation to buy yet another SF2 on SNES or Genesis. Then came the Alpha series, which I really enjoyed. I skipped the EX series because everyone was just dumping on it so much. Then Street Fighter III came out on Dreamcast, and I decided "eh, pass." I'd played SF3 a few times in the arcade and decided it wasn't my thing at the time. I'd later changed my mind and picked up W Impact and the PS3 release of 3rd Strike. Now, Street Fighter IV came out, and I was just blown away. This was everything I wanted in a Street Fighter game. A good roster, good music, with great controls and even some humor in there. Excellent! But again, Capcom went back to their "let's re-release what's largely the same game with some tweaks and additions" formula with Super, Super Arcade Edition and Ultra, and I was like "when Street Fighter V comes out, screw it, I'm going to wait until Super Turbo Ultra Whatever comes out."
It's obvious that Capcom heard this and decided to go in a different direction here with V. And I'm not at all upset with it -- I actually think it's a great idea. I love reading the reviews here where they dump on the single-player offline modes and then complain about having only 2000 in Fight Money, because that shows that they didn't give the single-player modes a chance at all. Each of the (admittedly VERY short) story modes earns you 10000 FM. For a whole 2-4 fights (and I think Laura is the only character with 4 so far). I say "so far" because the story modes are obviously set up for expansion in the future. They often end with a character who has been announced as DLC (one exception being Sakura at the end of... Karin's story, I think? She hasn't been announced, as I understand it, but she's probably going to be in there eventually). The story mode, despite the decreased length compared to the arcade mode of other games, offers a much deeper view into the background of these characters than in any other Street Fighter that I remember. And if you don't like the story parts, you can skip them and earn the Fight Money in like, a minute or two per character.
Then there's Survival Mode. I have only done a few of the characters on Easy so far, but this is obviously another way where you can earn a decent amount of Fight Money for unlocking characters and other things. It sounds like Capcom said that you need 100k in Fight Money for unlocking a character... I've played for a whole 3 hours or so total, and I've got 200k, so I'm ready for a couple of unlockables.
To be perfectly honest, while I hope Capcom does add an arcade mode, Survival mode is a reasonable approximation of it anyway, in my opinion. You only fight 1 round, and you carry your life bar over to the next match (unless you take "supplements" that cost part of your score), but for a seasoned SF player, you don't need to use the supplements very often, and it's an interesting mechanic (far more interesting than a bunch of "best of 3" fights against a CPU, in my opinion).
Anyway, it is obvious that Capcom focused on versus play here, and I've had nothing but good experiences with the online play (even though I often have gotten whooped -- I haven't noticed anything that seems to be the result of lag, just that I'm still getting used to the updated control scheme, and I was never a super player to begin with). I haven't had any issues with connectivity, but I got the game after 1.01 came out, so who knows.
Lastly, I just think it's silly to complain so much when Capcom has been forthcoming about when the content will arrive and what the updates will consist of. As a development engineer myself, I can fully understand why Capcom has done it this way, and I think that this model will help Capcom make the game better, in the end. You can wait to play it and hope for a price drop, but that doesn't help you unlock the characters and features down the road. Capcom has incentivized getting out to an early start, which I think is appropriate, given the model they're going with here.
In short, it's still a great game and I've had loads of fun with what's there today, just know what you're getting here before taking the plunge.
