Street Fighter V: Arcade Edition

Capcom collapsed with the launch of Street Fighter V. The desire to bring this item to the market before the start of the esports season resulted in the launch of a brawl with a small number of available characters, no basic gameplay modes and problematic network code, which caused players to be constantly kicked from the servers. Especially the last drawback could make its toll, because the design of the game meant that in order to get profits from ending single player modes, you had to be logged in to the network. Admittedly, the great combat system made this production win over professional players, but for the rest of the game the title was a great disappointment - including for the publisher himself, as the sales results turned out to be very unsatisfactory.

However, the Japanese did not give up and over the past two years they have gradually changed the face of their flagship fight. The additional characters released on average every two months (available for purchase as paid DLC or with the currency obtained during the game) enriched the list of street warriors and warriors. The campaign, published six months after its premiere, was full of fictional stuff, but it gave players less passionate about developing their own skills a few hours of pleasant gameplay. The network infrastructure repaired in the summer of 2017 finally solved the problems with dropping connections.

The Arcade Edition is the final step in this revitalization, after which Street Fighter V has finally become the great game it should have been from the start. This is an improvement that introduces many long-awaited fixes, expands the combat system with new techniques, refreshes the interface and brings several additional gameplay modes - with the title Arcade at the fore.

Games room

The main attraction of the new version of the game is the title Arcade mode - a fun variant well-known to all lovers of the genre, usually being the primary place to polish your own abilities in a fight with artificial intelligence . His absence was one of the more frequent accusations against SFV . Capcom has to admit that when he decided to implement this mode, he did not limit himself to the absolute minimum, but instead introducing a lot of variety to the fun.

Arcade Mode has been divided into six different, cleverly referring to nostalgia paths - each devoted to a different numbered installment of the cycle, one also received the Alpha sub-series. Depending on what we choose, we will only have characters appearing in a given part of Street Fighter (i.e. we will play as Ryu everywhere, but such Ibuki will only appear in scenes from Street Fighter III and above, while the era of Street Fighter V will give access to all current and future warriors), we will fight a different number of fights, and at the end, as a reward, there will be another graphic waiting for us that summarizes what happened with a given hero in the plot of this particular game.

A nice touch is also the fact that when we choose the tracks of older productions, our opponents (also selected only from the pool available for a given version) will be dressed not in their classic costumes, but their nostalgic variants. Contrary to the infamous survival mode from the base Street Fighter V, our opponents now include all available characters, not just the base sixteen. The same applies to arenas - we will play on every map available in the game, even if we do not have it purchased.

The fights in Arcade mode are fought according to a traditional pattern, varied with a few details. Between the clashes, we can choose one of the two opponents with whom we will face in the next skirmish. The bonus drawings that we unlock by meeting certain requirements (e.g. by walking the path at the highest difficulty level or without even one loss) encourage people to return to this variant of the game many times. Arcade Mode has been implemented perfectly and works great as the main variant of the game for lonely players or as a way to kill time waiting for the game to find an opponent in the online mode.

I bet everything

The other new variants of the game are Team Battle and Extra Battle. The first one is a traditional team competition, in which subsequent duels are fought by teams of several people. Formerly one of the inherent modes of every self-respecting fight - more and more often unavailable in new titles - it is a nice addition to the classic one-on-one fights. Especially that there are a lot of options for adjusting group matches to our needs.

Extra Battle looks much more interesting. We will find there a time-limited and special rules-based skirmish, victory in which is rewarded with game currency, experience points, special titles or even one of the four garments from a larger set - after completing the whole, we get an exclusive, otherwise unavailable costume, changing the appearance of one of the characters into the hero of any of Capcom's other games. Currently, three such costumes have been revealed - the Viewtiful Joe hero costume for Rashid, the June Star Gladiator costume for Chun-Li, and the Captain Commando costume for Nash.

V-fight

Although I have always preferred Tekken , I have to admit that in this generation it is the fifth "Street Warrior" that I enjoy most. The duels are not only effective, but also have a lot of depth. In addition to the typical mechanics of the series, such as combos and a bar loaded with blows that allow you to use particularly powerful attacks, the game offers the so-called V-System. It consists of one more bar, this time loaded when we get hit and when performing a unique stroke for each character called V-Skill. The next levels of this bar (called - of course - V-Gauge) can be used to escape from the storm of opponent's blows and to perform the so-called V-Trigger - a special buff or a particularly strong attack.

This mechanics, when properly applied, allows you to effectively reverse the tide of combat, so that even with a large advantage of health points, we still have to be careful. Fortunately, the game allows you to painlessly master all the nuances - we learn the basics during the fictionalized tutorial, and to explore more advanced techniques, a series of demonstrations, trials and a classic training mode have been prepared - as part of the Arcade Edition, the latter has been expanded with additional options for displaying animation frames, a very useful function if you are thinking of playing more seriously.

Most of all, however, the new version, in addition to a number of improvements to balance the game, introduces a second V-Trigger for each character. You cannot use both at the same time - you have to decide before the fight whether you are using the old or the new one. The new attack can change a lot in the style of our game - for example, Ryu has a powerful counterattack at his disposal, Kolin performs a very quick slide, and the devastating Zangief throws get even stronger. Some characters have become more useful thanks to new triggers, for others the original one still works better, but in general, thanks to this element, the fights have become fresh without losing any of their attractiveness.