Editor’s note: As with most people, we took a little longer to allow the online kinks to be worked out.  As soon as my reviewer was able to play it adequately, they did so and we were able to get a quality review.  Thank you for your patience, as we would rather give you a full review than one fraught with issues.  Thanks!

by Adam Merica

With Street Fighter V only being out for just a couple of days I can feel calluses forming and sodium levels rising. Capcom’s premier fighter is back with new fighters, new mechanics, new fresh paint for veteran characters, with old issues still plaguing us.

When starting the game for the first time we are treated with a in depth tutorial that goes through the basics and advanced fundamentals. While I opted out of this, it is great to see Capcom welcoming tnew players with this.

After the tutorial we are met with the home screen where we start our journey as world warriors. Story mode catches us up with a character’s plot line through simple watercolor drawings and very simple one round matches. Each character’s story can be completed in under a few minutes with all sixteen stories being completed in under a hour; this will be addressed later.

Next up is survival mode where you take a character through easy, normal, hard, or hell difficulties. You rack up points for beating your opponent fast, stunning them, or ending the round with a special move. You then have the option to spend said points on a buff, health regain, or a debuff that multiplies your score all for the next round.

Training mode is back and as always it’s a great way to spend time grinding out character’s combos and learning all the data you need to help you out when it’s time to step into the online world. Before we talk about online let’s get into all the basics. As with any Street Fighter you can expect solid fighting game mechanics. New to the series is a character’s V-Skill and V-Trigger. V-Skills can be used as much as you would like while normally being an attack of some sort some characters may gain a parry or something to break pesky fireballs. V-Triggers require a meter that you gain throughout the match and normally add a timed buff that either increases damage or gives an increase in mobility.

Each character feels different, very well balanced and for the first time I want to play all the characters and really sit down and learn them. Everyone in the game looks amazing, as does the game itself. The backgrounds are vibrant, neon lights reflect on busy streets and waterfalls glisten. Every stage is accompanied by an incredible soundtrack and hearing old favorites redone gets my blood pumping. The music is by far some of the best for the series.

Online at the moment is bare bones. Ranked and casual matches are exactly what you expect. You have the option to set fight requests on so no matter what mode you are in you can be assured a challenger is around the corner. Battle lounge lets you set match criteria for one on one battles. What confuses me the most is that you have to set a favorite character for online matches so when challenged you do not have the option to choose a character as it automatically chooses your favorite and the match starts.

As far as playing online, the servers have been problematic but that is to be expected on new games for the first few days. The online matches I have played ran amazingly well even playing with people across the world. This is where praise starts to end. Remember when I mentioned the story was relatively short? Come March, Capcom is giving us an update and with that, we can expect a longer and more in depth story mode, one character release, updated battle lounge where you can have more than one person in a room, daily challenges, trial mode, and a store to purchase new outfits, colors, characters. In some ways, it may make gamers wonder why this wasn’t already in the game at launch.

As far as in game collectibles, you can use an in game currency called ‘fight money’ that you earn by playing the game to purchase these items or with actual money. As a Street Fighter fan I am not surprised to feel like I only got a partial game on day one which is a shame as fans should not be conditioned to know that I am going to have to wait and pay more for to fully play the game. What we do get is a technical fighter with a deep set of tools that welcomes new players and has experienced players feeling down right fierce.

4 V-skills out of 5.