We were excited to start our day with a super early look at the recently announced Street Fighter 6. For those unaware, Street Fighter started in the ‘90s as a pretty simple batch of colorful characters in a player versus player knockout fight. This was Mortal Kombat’s more civil and professional cousin. Where MK focused on blood, violence and fatalities, Street Fighter (and most importantly the monstrously successful Street Fighter 2) was all about careful skill. It was a fighting game anybody could walk up and button mash on, but in what is now a gigantic eSports possible world, it was one of the few games that really afforded itself to increasing skill of professional players.

The game has gone through many evolutions over the decades and this session was just a small taste of what Street Fighters 6 likely will include. As of press time, the demo we experienced included four announced characters thus far: Luke, a very beardy Ryu, Chun-Li and new character Jamie. This demo was only in the Fighting Ground experience and did not include the World Tour and Battle Hub features, so it was just us against the AI experimenting with the various mechanics of these four characters. Street Fighter 6 boasts an alternate mode designed to remove the need for complex controller and button combinations for special moves, one that takes a move such as Ryu’s hadouken and just assigns it to a particular button. Seemingly designed to entice more casual players, we opted for the old school regular combo button procedures. The game is beautiful, and the animations are fluid between combos and special moves. When the right series of actions are taken, the combos are thrilling and eye popping.

Our big issue not being an expert in Street Fighter games was that the title seemed to beg for attempting larger chains of hit combos, but it wasn’t really clear without documentation how to figure them out. The game did have its own in-menu guides for special moves, but the help on hand at the Capcom pod at Summer Game Fest couldn’t really direct us to any way to learn how to quickly ramp up at the multiple hit combos. For our part, the classic characters Ryu and Chun-Li were the most fun to experiment with, but to be fair, that may come from our own experience being familiar with their dynamics. There’s still something to be said about catching an opponent unaware with a shoryuken uppercut.

Street Fighter 6 will be released worldwide sometime in 2023.