Recent reviews by Gailim

Fantastic strategy game

great art

A good game with some problems

don't let the internet hate brigade fool you. this is a great fighting game. But it does have issues that need to be addressed

the good:

1) Crossplay with PS4.
this is the single greatest advantage SF5 has over every other fighting game on steam. A fighting game lives and dies with it's player population. a fighting game with nobody to play with is not a fighting game at all. While SF4 had a decent player population throughout it's run it pales in comparison to the amount of people playing this game.

2) 3 frame input buffer.
some people list this as a con; I could not disagree more. the 3 frame input buffer adds an extra 2 frames of input leniency meaning that a 1 frame link on paper becomes a 3 frame link in practice. this single change makes the game 10x more fun in an online setting because you can actually do combos. and learning combos comes much faster. with a lowered execution barrier the more stratigic elements (ie: the fun part) is availible to more people. some might bemoan the fact that more people can pull off flashier combos with less work. but I think the more people experiencing higher levels of play the better. being able to do combos encourages people to stick with the game and learn the more difficult mental aspects

3) decent online
I won't lie, this game does not have the best online netcode. look towards Skull Girls or Killer Instict for that. But it is not the horror show some make it out to be. It is a definite improvement over SF4. I played that game for 6 years and it's old fashioned delayed input necode was poor on all but the best connections. the constantly changing input timings made attempting combos a useless effort. it stunted my advancement as a player. SF5 uses rollback netcode that preserves input timings at the expense of some visual stuttering. where as SF4 would actually slow the game down in laggy conditions, this game will snap the game back. both formats are unplayable in a bad connection but this one is much better in middling connections. Online is where you are going to be spending the majority of your time in SF5 and over the last year I have had a lot of fun. one thing worth mentioning, the matchmaking for ranked and casual matches does a good job of matching you with players either at your rank, one below, or one above. however it does take longer than it should to find a match.

4) DLC practices
yes, you read that right, this games DLC practices are a pro, not a con. esspecially compared to the way other fighting games handle DLC. first, you can earn characters for free. and yes, it *IS* possible to do. most fight money is earned in single player at first. but after that you will be getting it from the weekly challenges. most weeks offer between 6.6K and 10.6K per week in fight money. you also earn 1K every time you level up a character. it is also important to remember that when you get a new character they come with more single player content that you can earn FM in. new characters come out roughly every two months and in that time it is absolutely possible to earn the 100k neccesary with 3-4 hours a week of play time.

now I should mention that while it is possible to keep up with the release schedule, if you are just now jumping in you will not be able to earn enough FM to get all the characters for free as much of the FM that others have used to do that were in the form of challenges that have expired. so if you are buying this game for the first time you need to ask yourself if you really care about getting every character, and if you do it is probably a good idea to get at least one of the character passes. after that you should be able to keep up with the DLC release schedule and not have to spend money on new characters.

compare that to other fighting games, Arc games hide all updatese behind paywalls and sometimes charge more for individual characters on top of that. NRS characters always cost money and ussually have to be bought in packs. it is easy to look at SF5 and say it has a lot of DLC characters, and it does. but compared to the way the competition handles things I think this is much better

5) Training mode
don't overlook this mode. the tools you will find in the menu's here will help you immensly. there is too much to talk about in a review but do yourself a favor and look up a training mode tutorial on you tube.

6) Capcom Fighters Network (CFN)
like training mode, this thing is a goldmine of information. you can look up the last 100 matches of any player on earth in Ranked, Casual, or Battle Lounge. if you want to learn a character, or want to learn how to beat a character this is the mode for you. you can sort replays by character, and player rank.

also, make sure to watch your own replays, esspecially your losses. you can learn a lot by taking a second look


now for the bad stuff

1) some janky visuals
this game has stylized visuals that on the whole looks very good (it looks better in motion than in screen shots) but there are areas where it falls short. even a year and a half after release there are still numorous clipping issues most noticebly Ken's default hair will often clip through his shoulder on the select screen. and speaking of Ken, his face really is as bad as everyone says. Ibuki's win pose has also been known to cause nightmares

2) server downtime
one of the downsides of crossplay is that Capcom have to run 3rd party servers to facilitate it. this ussually means there are one or two times a month where the servers are down for a few hours. it is not as big a deal as some make it out to be but it would be nice if they found a way for it to stop happening.

3) the story was poorly put together
the overall plot of the story wasn't so bad. but the execution left a lot to be desired. Capcom needs to hire a director and an editor with experience making movies. the writing was also quite poor. there were some good ideas, but they need to try harder next time

4) survival mode
this mode sucks, the easy version is worth playing for the FM with every character, normal mode can done reasonbly fast if you know how to play a character. hard and extreme should never be played for any reason. I really wish capcom would take another look at this mode.



overall, SF5 is a great place to start if you are just getting into fighting games. if your looking for a game you can play for years instead of months, this is an easy reccomendation