Street Fighter V - Incompletely Incredible

The wait is finally over and Street Fighter V is here. Well... parts of it. 16 fighters, a solid online mode, survival finally makes its return aaaand that about sums it up. Not a whole lot for 60 bucks, really. Yes, I get it, Capcom Cup and all  that, but releasing such an unfinished game to Average Joe with such a fat price tag attached seems rather greedy. In its current state, SFV doesn't even support most fightsticks, so enjoy playing that thing with your keyboard or Xbox controllers. After roughly a decade of playing Street Fighter with Genesis and Saturn controllers, I don't even mind. I bet lots of the folks who couldn't wait to preorder this game won't be so happy, though.

Ranked online matches are great. PS4 to PC cross platform play is a thing here and I don't get the massive input lag I'm used to from SFIV and King of Fighters XIII. At all. During my first two or so hours I've encountered one possible lag-switcher (guy who suddenly starts stuttering and teleporting all over the screen the moment the fight doesn't go his way) and one quitter (guy who disconnected when the fight didn't go his way). Playing online has been amazing aside from that and I'm actually holding up fairly well for now.

At least ten people out there suck harder than I do.

This game is turning out to be a real fountain of youth so far. I started off on a small win streak and felt my blood pumping like back in the days when I played at the arcade. Look, I have work to do, bills to pay and I don't think I'll ever get involved or obsessive enough to play on any serious competitive level, but it's nice how after just a few minutes with SFV things immediately feel like the 'good old days' again.

I'm fully aware of the fact that most of my victories are related to a) lots of newcomers and optimistic gamers, who think they're tough because they can beat the AI on normal difficulty and b) my fighting style, which has been described by others as "what the fuck is that asshole even doing?"
Of course it also helps how the vast majority of players haven't yet checked youtube or gamefaqs in order to copy and master a single 20hit combo for exactly one character, which they'll proceed to use over and over again. If controllers were a musical instrument, then lots of mediocre SF players would solely depend on those one or two bits of sheet music they've memorized. I prefer to improvise. It looks shit, but it gets the job done. Against other mediocre players, anyway.

Winning a ton of fight money for a shop that is not yet available.

Too bad the offline portion of the game isn't anywhere near as satisfying. Yes, the aforementioned survival mode, which has been strangely absent from SFIV, is finally back. Which is great, because survival has always been one of my favourite game modes in any fighting game. But while the AI seems competent enough on the hardest difficulty setting, most offline opposition feels almost entirely braindead until you actually get to that point.

On top of that, 'Story Mode' consists of two to four battles per character, which usually don't even last for more than one round. There is no difficulty setting here, the AI hardly fights back at all and literally five minutes later the fun is over. The rest of the story is supposed to be added in later as free DLC. Fair enough, but who the hell gives a crap about the story, anyway? Why not at least add an arcade mode? How is it possible for a fighting game to ship without a fucking arcade mode? What are people supposed to do until stoy mode ships, just play survival all day? I get it, it's 2016 and these games are meant to be played competitively, but what about total newcomers, who want to get the hang of things before facing the ridiculously fierce online community? The included tutorial is an absolute joke and won't do anything to help you learn how it's done.

If you want online opponents to eat foot, you could always wait for them to go AFK.

Right now, if you're more of a singleplayer kind of guy or you simply want to get the hang of things before you get eaten alive online, the amount of stuff you get to do on here can be summarized as, 'fuck all'.

I should be appalled by the utter lack of content, the relatively tiny roster of characters and the complete lack of costumes for all characters (except some preorder outfit for Chun Li). I've already seen preview images of alternate outfits, so why is the shop still locked? How do I get this shit? Why is nothing on there ever explained properly?

Nuking somebody through their ex combo is incredibly satisfying.

And looking at the Steam Store page, only 46% of user reviews right now are positive, so there must be more than a handful of people dissatisfied with this launch. And I so love to hate stuff! But you know what? I'm too busy having fun on here. If I keep going at this rate I should leave rookie league behind me within the hour. And I'll be sporting a semi the entire time. Rawr!