Street Fighter V review - PS4, PC: Promising start to unfinished package

Available on PS4 and PC from £34.99

Let’s start by being blunt; this is not a finished game. If you do decide to purchase Capcom’s latest fighting simulator, be warned, your copy of Street Fighter V won’t contain a proper story mode, allow you to spend your in-game currency, use the battle lounge to its full extent or access challenge mode.

Instead, what you get via your disk/download is a promise; a promise of more content to come. So, what is actually on your disk?

Well, Street Fighter V is a sturdy, smooth and beautifully built fighting game which *could* take the series to a new level. While the 16 *currently* not-very-customisable characters may be cliché - with some of the newer characters seeming very similar to those already seen in rival fighter Tekken (i.e. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu fighter Laura and Christie Monteiro) - each one has an endearing personality, both in fighting ability and aesthetic.

Unlike Tekken, this leads to each specially selected character - including eight classics, four returning fan favourites, and four newcomers - to feel very different. For instance, playing as Ryu, shooting off hadoukens whenever possible, feels completely different to throwing elongated punches as Dhalsim, or the rapid kicks as Rashid.

The new battle system, which implements the new 'V-Gauge', highlights the differences between each character further, allowing their defining abilities to become even stronger while adding another dimension to fights. There is also the updated 'Stun meter' which remains as frustrating as ever.

One current gripe would be that mastering a single fighter’s abilities can be quite a slog. Unfortunately, when you make the leap from single player to online (one of only three main game modes *currently* accessible), it is a steep learning curve, one that led me to repeatedly play survival, re-do the short pre-story story, and train and train and train.

Without a challenge mode - which we're promised is coming - you're not smoothly taken from beginner to all-star. When this mode does comes through, as well as a full story, hopefully this problem will be fixed. But that’s the problem, at the moment we’re longing for more.

Plus, there’s the whole “How much will we have to pay for new characters?” question. Well, Capcom has promised that you’ll be able to purchase them with winnable in-game money, yet without challenges or an open store, it is hard to gauge how easy it will be able to accomplish this.

With the promise of more content, it all feels like an episodic game, and without the final product, it is hard to give a conclusive review. With the hope Capcom can deliver more modes, customisation, and a more speedy match-making process, this could easily become a fighting classic. But Capcom really does need to deliver first.