Story is what I was mainly interested in for this game this time around and despite the pretty anti-climactic ending it was actually pretty decent. Character interactions are pretty fluid and the comedic moments feel more organic than campy or out of character.

Combat is slow and meaty but I mean that in a good way. It's gonna take some getting used to but my definite complaint is that I really dislike not being able to call kameos MID combo and I'm forced to just stop what im doing to call them out and use it as a combo starter rather than what most assist based fighting games do.

Maybe its a question of forcing yourself to learn combos to make combat smoother, but it definitely feels clunkier for people not familiar with the series. I do wonder where the series goes from a neutral position as it is in atm...

Pretty big upgrade from SF2. Character designs are really cool looking, the arcade mode is actually playable this time, secret characters, Final Fight characters, dramatic battles and combo cancelling being introduced is a cool touch up from previous games. Character rival cutscenes in arcade mode is also really exciting and adds a really nice touch to the early lore beginnings for this series.

This game still got hella crust to it tho. Inputs (especially for supers) don't always register. The AI is seemingly trained to constantly run away from you and its frustrating to try and enter when the stages (which are also kind of bland) are unnecessarily long so it gives them constant room to run and dodge you. Combo cancelling is fun until Bison's AI starts queueing up like 20 charge moves and keeps you in a string. And when taking into account the bad input registration, it makes charge characters a nightmare to play. Also any AI character with a fireball is an asshole and spams 30 fireballs at you the moment the round starts to zone you out.

(I'll review this version and not the 4 thousand re-releases it got before this one)

This is really fun to play with a friend casually, the Arcade can suck my balls though. Huge upgrade from every version that came before it in many ways. From graphics, extra moves and added characters. But the solo Arcade mode is the cheapest most difficult shit I've ever had the displeasure to play in a fighting game ever. There's literal tons evidence that this game cheats by reading your inputs and countering frame 1. Also hilarious that there's a glitch that scales the difficulty to max even if you drop it to the lowest level. It's so insane lmfao

Basically Super meat boy in FPS but with your run of the mill cyberpunk aesthetic. Challenging and fun but often times gets tedious and loses enjoyment when you're repeating the same encounter 200x cause you didn't get it frame perfect the first time. I would have preferred they skip asking you to restart and just let you do it manually with R. Some of the in game directions get confusing cause too many of the objective colors blend in with the neon signs in the map so you have no choice but to wander for a while to figure out your next step. Story is also pretty flat and the soundtrack doesn't really stand out.