Street Fighter 6
Street Fighter 6 has something for everyone! Modern and dynamic control types allow for more disabled players to fully experience the combat. Still, without menu narration blind players will have a difficult time.
Pros
- Comprehensive audio cues
- Fully customizable HUD
- Accessible Windowed Mode
- Streamlined combo options
- Dynamic camera assist
Cons
- No menu narration
- No captions
- Accessible control type is limited to certain modes
Take the fight to the streets and become the strongest you can be! Street Fighter 6 is the newest fighting game developed and published by Capcom, and released on the PlayStation 5, PlayStation 4, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S, and PC. I’m reviewing the Steam version of the game on Windows. New to the franchise is the inclusion of customizable fighting avatars, real-time commentary, and streamlined combos. The Dynamic control type is also a new addition to Street Fighter and simplifies attack inputs, which will definitely improve the accessibility for both new and disabled players.
This time around, there are three different game modes to experience. Fighting Ground has training mode and brings back classic versus battles. Battle Hub is an online mode that allows players to participate in ranked matches and play emulated Capcom titles in a retro arcade style. World Tour gives players the option to create their own character for the first time, and explore a single-player story mode from an over-the-shoulder third-person perspective. Like previous games in the franchise, Street Fighter 6 lets players go at it in online or local battles, and crossplay is available for playing with friends on different platforms.
Starting The Fight
When I started up the game, I was instantly met with language options and choices for regional differences. From there came the title screen, then once a short introductory video played, the main options menu became available after pressing the Tab key.
Here there were options to change the resolution. Both Windowed mode and Borderless Windowed mode worked perfectly for me. In Windowed mode, the game allowed me to access my on-screen keyboard whenever I needed it, and this carried over to all three game modes.
The options menu has several different tabs for things like basic game settings, controls, camera, display, and audio. There is a dedicated Accessibility tab located under Audio. Customizable control settings are available and spread throughout the Game and Control tabs. Each game mode has different control settings that you can customize, but I will go into more detail about controls in the sections below.
Dynamic Controls
Street Fighter 6 has three different control types for fighting: Classic, Modern, and Dynamic. Classic utilizes a twelve button control scheme, Modern controls simplifies attacks to six buttons, and Dynamic uses an auto-attack function that revolves around only pressing three buttons.
Dynamic controls have the game decide what combos to do depending on the situation, and it’s definitely the most accessible control type for disabled players with fine-motor skill impairments. Just by pressing one button, my fighter did several combos and even jumped back and forth over my opponent.
Unfortunately, they are not allowed in World Tour mode and only available in Fighting Ground mode. I understand not having those controls for online matches because of balancing issues, but not having them in World Tour (a purely single-player experience) seems like a baffling design choice.
World Tour and Battle Hub
Despite not having the accessible control type, I had some of the most fun playing World Tour mode. World Tour acts as a guide for players to learn how to utilize certain moves, combos, and fighting styles. Every master that trained me, opened up more moves and skill sets as I progressed.
In between 2D battles, World Tour had me doing a lot of exploring, fighting gang members, and side quests. These moments change the perspective to a third-person view and allow for moving the camera freely. Thankfully, Street Fighter 6 has a ton of camera controls that I could change in the options menu.
Camera assist could be turned on to keep the camera pointing in the direction of my player, and I could also choose the length of time for when the camera assist kicked in. This feature took away some of my anxiety of messing with the camera, so I could just focus on fighting.
Battle Hub was the next mode I accessed and it’s there I could participate in ranked matches, play mini-games, and put my created avatar fighter up against other players’ avatars. Battle Hub has the same over-the-shoulder perspective and control scheme as World Tour.
Fighting Ground
Fighting Ground has a training mode to practice combos, play local or online versus battles, and short story campaigns to complete for individual Street Fighter characters. Many aspects of these campaigns can be adjusted beforehand like the amount of rounds required, costumes, and control types.
This is the only mode that has difficulty settings which determine A.I. opponent levels and include: Easiest, Easy, Normal, Hard and Hardest difficulty. There are 18 fighters to choose from, new and old, each with different fighting styles. I must say that Dynamic controls are a huge part of why I enjoyed this mode.
Until now, I’ve never been able to perform Zangief’s (my favorite Street Fighter character) signature move the “Double Lariat”, because it required too many inputs and my disability made it too difficult for me to move fast enough. Several new characters have move sets I could only experience with Dynamic controls, like Kimberly Jackson’s spray paint combos. The character J.P. has complex combos that are primarily ranged, so without Dynamic controls I really wouldn’t be able to use him at all.
Audio Accessibility
The best way to describe the audio accessibility in Street Fighter 6 is taking one step forward and two steps back. There are a large array of audio cues available for blind players, which mainly center around combat. Different audio cues are available for attack hits, health depletion, Drive Gauge, Super Moves, and the player’s distance from the opponent.
However, there is no menu narration in the game. This will be a huge obstacle for blind players, who would have to have sighted assistance to help them get into a fight. This being the only way they could even access the audio cues. It’s a shame, because it’s obvious there was some care and research done to accommodate blind players’ gameplay experience.
There are so many ways to customize audio levels in the game. For starters, I can customize individual sound levels for music, sound effects, system sounds, and character voices. There’s even more audio customization for attack sounds, footsteps, cut-scene sound effects, battle HUD sounds, and objects in the environment. I can even customize the sound levels of clothing! That’s something I’ve never seen in a game until now.
Subtitles are available and turned on automatically for all three game modes. There’s a subtitle slider for customizing the background opacity. Unfortunately, there isn’t a way to change the subtitle size and background dialog is inconsistently shown. I also noticed that fighter intros are not subtitled at all.
Colorful Visuals
Street Fighter 6 has a cool urban-graffiti art style with bright, vivid colors throughout. Super moves are more stylized than ever before, and the game HUD did get visually chaotic rather quickly. Thankfully, the game offers many different ways to customize the game HUD and battle HUD individually.
For instance, the minimap size and rotation can be adjusted in World Tour mode. I was able to turn on visual notifications for when I picked up items, updates for the coaches’ relationship status, and when gang members had left certain areas of the map. Also, the battle HUD can be adjusted or completely turned off if preferred.
There’s a brightness slider under the Display tab in the options menu. Something interesting I noticed was the option to change the background image when adjusting the brightness slider. This was great for seeing how characters would look in different shadows and lighting. I’m glad to see an uncommon option like that show up here.
Conclusion
Street Fighter 6 with its ranked matches, new character creator, and emulated classics, seriously has something for everyone! Modern and dynamic control types allow for many more disabled players with fine motor-skill impairments to fully experience the combat. Still, without menu narration, blind players will have a difficult time accessing the audio cues in battles.
