Posts with «author_name|jessica conditt» label

'Stray' review: A cute and contained cyberpunk adventure game

Despite the fact that it stars a cat, there’s no extra fluff in Stray. The game takes place under the dome of an artificial sky, in a futuristic city populated by robots and cut off from the natural world, and mechanically, it’s also perfectly contained. Every detail in Stray serves a purpose, whether it’s an environmental cue nudging players toward a specific path or the ability to meow at will, which is adorable, but can also distract enemies in combat scenes.

Stray is a cyberpunk playground where players are rewarded for trusting their instincts, and it offers a beautiful balance of exploration, puzzle solving and soothing cat activities. And somehow along the way, it manages to tell a heart-wrenching human story without any people at all.

Cat people, you’re going to love Stray, but there are also some scenes that are hard to watch. The game begins with a gang of four cats living their best lives in a lush, overgrown industrial park that’s long been abandoned by people. Players are an orange tabby, leaping across huge pipes and steel beams until one slip changes everything. As its friends look on, the cat falls dozens of storeys down a deep, pitch-black hole, landing in a broken heap on the concrete floor of a sewer. The cat is injured, making players walk around limping and woozy for a while before recovering normal mobility. The injury scene is tough to watch and even harder to play, even for a dog person like myself, but it builds an instant emotional connection with the tabby that carries through the entire game.

The bulk of Stray takes place in the neon-lit neighborhoods trapped under the dome and populated by anthropomorphic robots. Players explore while trying to find a way back to their friends in the sunlight, and eventually the cat is equipped with a cute little drone that helps it communicate with the robots and hack certain terminals. The drone, B-12, is attempting to solve a mystery of its own – while traversing the cities, players collect memories from random shining objects, helping B-12 remember where it came from.

Stray’s world was built for humans and bipedal robots, which makes it particularly intriguing to explore as a cat. From a foot off the ground, things like doors are useless, while items like pipes, railings and air conditioning units provide ideal platforms for scaling buildings and navigating the twisting alleyways under the dome. The environmental puzzles take advantage of this cat-level perspective, inviting players to look at the world with different, light-reflective eyes.

BlueTwelve Studio

None of the riddles in Stray are overly complicated, though quite a few of them are clever. The most engaging puzzles ask players to travel back and forth among multiple locations, helping or tricking various robots to get what’s needed, with minimal direction from the game itself. These puzzles are solved by exploring the cities and talking with their inhabitants, naturally building out the lore at the same time. And Stray doesn’t stick with any mechanic for too long, presenting new enemies and fresh situations to solve with each environment.

The path forward in Stray is usually obvious, with yellow paint marking jumpable platforms and large neon arrows often pointing the way. These navigation elements aren’t exactly subtle, but they blend into the richness of the city, only standing out when they’re really needed. This makes progressing in Stray feel completely natural – with the environment constantly directing players along the proper path, the next leap is usually the right one, and this keeps the pace up nicely overall.

There are minimal on-screen instructions in Stray, and most of them have to do with performing housecat activities like scratching rugs, knocking over plants and paint cans, and curling up to sleep. These actions are cute as hell, but they also help move the narrative forward at times. For instance, clawing a couch leg is fun and adorable, but the cat can also scratch at certain doors to make the robots open up, unlocking new rooms of secrets. Meowing, meanwhile, can happen at any time, even during cutscenes or while sleeping, and this is pretty much the best mechanic in the game.

The most common on-screen prompt is a small indicator that clings to the edge of any jumpable surface, whether the cat is climbing up or leaping down. This is the most restrictive mechanic in the game, as it dictates where the cat can move and sometimes cuts off pathways that look viable. There are plenty of moments in the game where I feel stuck for a moment, wanting to jump to a specific area but unable to move without that small white dot telling me I can. This dampens the game’s feeling of freedom and adds hiccups to its overall pacing, but it doesn’t destroy the ability to explore the cities completely. I’d say I’m able to complete 80 percent of the jumps I want to. I also see how this mechanic helps cultivate a sense of cat-like confidence in every scene – it’s impossible to fall off the edge of a walkway, no matter how thin or wobbly, because you can’t leave until that dot shows up on a nearby platform. With invisible walls like these, who needs nine lives?

BlueTwelve Studio

I do, apparently. While players are unable to leap to their doom, it is possible to die in Stray – and I did, more than once. The city under the dome is infested with vicious bacterial blobs that chase the cat relentlessly any time it’s near, creating a handful of dramatic run-and-dodge sequences. If the blobs jump on the cat and stay there for a few seconds, it’s game over and you start at the last checkpoint, which is usually just a minute or so behind. There are also hovering sentinels in the later levels that shoot anything that enters their pool of light, leading to a lot of shadow-slinking and some intense timing puzzles.

Among all of the puzzle-solving, ledge-leaping and blob-dodging, Stray introduces a world of lighthearted dystopia, where robots don’t hate the humans that came before them, and instead attempt to cultivate plants that can survive under the darkness of the dome, just because people would have liked that. The robots themselves have distinct personalities and engaging histories, and as a cat, I was able to soak it all up and carry these stories along my journey.

Compared with most dystopian cyberpunk games, Stray is downright joyful. It’s a perfectly contained adventure game with plenty of fresh ideas, each one pared down to its purest form. Even the meow mechanic.

Stray comes out on July 19th for PlayStation 4, PS5 and PC.

Scammers are blackmailing restaurants across the US with one-star Google reviews

For the past week, a handful of high-profile and Michelin-starred restaurants from San Francisco to New York City have been targeted in an extortion campaign weaponizing Google reviews. It appears to be a coordinated effort with a repeatable strategy: The restaurants receive a barrage of one-star reviews on Google — you know, the ratings that show up when you search for anything on Maps — and then the owners receive an apologetic email asking for a $75 Google Play gift card in order to stop the digital bombing.

Kim Alter is chef and owner of Nightbird, a fine dining restaurant in San Francisco that was hit by this campaign. On July 5th, she shared an email she received from the extortionists after her restaurant was inundated with negative reviews. The email read as follows:

"Hello. Unfortunately, negative feedback about your establishment has been left by us. And will appear in the future, one review a day. We sincerely apologize for our actions, and would not want to harm your business, but we have no other choice. The fact is that we live in India and see no other way to survive. We are begging you to send us google play gift card worth $75."

The message then offered a link to buy the gift card on PayPal and an email address to receive the code. It concluded with another apology.

Hey @Google you think you could help small businesses in SF being blackmailed and giving 1* reviews to @acquerellosf@3rdcousinsf@sonsdaughterssf#marlena#birdsong@chezpimpic.twitter.com/nw3AXtYxDp

— Kim Alter (@KimAlter1) July 5, 2022

Alter shared the email on Twitter and tagged Google, asking for the company's help in removing scam-related reviews. She tagged a handful of other acclaimed SF-based restaurants that were experiencing the same review bombing, including Sons & Daughters, Acquerello, 3rd Cousin, Marlena, Birdsong and Nari. But this wasn't just a West coast thing — high-profile restaurants across the country received the same threats and negative reviews this past week, including Ever, Roux, EL Ideas and Sochi Saigonese Kitchen in Chicago.

A Google Maps spokesperson told The New York Times on Monday that the company was investigating the issue and removing reviews from people who didn't actually visit these establishments. The Google Maps team explained in February how it used machine learning and live moderation to identify and stop review bombing, writing, "Our systems continue to analyze the contributed content and watch for questionable patterns. These patterns can be anything from a group of people leaving reviews on the same cluster of Business Profiles to a business or place receiving an unusually high number of 1 or 5-star reviews over a short period of time."

This particular extortion campaign seems to fall in that final category, with restaurants receiving a bunch of one-star reviews at once, but owners like Alter had to take the issue to social media to get help from Google. One week after Alter's tweet, it looks like the scam-related one-star reviews have been purged from the affected restaurants' profiles — for now.

'Skull and Bones' finally arrives on November 8th, just four years behind schedule

Skull and Bones, Ubisoft's long-awaited open-world pirate simulator, is coming out on November 8th, 2022. It's due to hit Xbox Series X and S, PlayStation 5, Steam, the Epic Games Store, Google Stadia and Amazon Luna, as well as Ubisoft Connect. 

This release date has been a long time coming — Skull and Bones was announced at E3 2017 and it was even playable at that show two years in a row, but Ubisoft has kept fairly silent on the pirate sim since 2018. In today's stream, developers briefly explained what happened: Part-way through development, they rebooted the game as a grittier, more realistic experience than originally planned. Today, Ubisoft showed off the reimagined Skull and Bones with a live stream, cinematic trailer and gameplay video.

At its heart, Skull and Bones is an open-world, online experience with co-op elements, but players will be able to log into PvP servers as well. The core game is all about climbing the ranks to become an infamous pirate on the Indian Ocean, sailing, crafting, managing assets, battling and strategizing on the high seas during the golden age of piracy.

Players start with a small ship and as they progress, they're able to craft larger and more intricate vessels, customizing along the way. As captain, players have to manage the crew, and ensure they're well-fed and happy enough to stop any thoughts of mutiny. If the ship sinks, players start over and can recover their cargo, as long as another pirate doesn't get there first.

Ubisoft is set to host another showcase on September 10th, this one focused on Assassin's Creed and some of its other, less piratey, properties.

NASA's CAPSTONE satellite has gone dark

NASA has lost contact with CAPSTONE, a tiny satellite that left Earth's orbit on July 4th. CAPSTONE is a cubesat weighing just 55 pounds, and it's headed for the Moon as part of NASA's plan to get humans back on the lunar surface for the first time in more than 50 years. 

The small satellite stopped communicating with engineers on July 4th shortly after deploying from an Electron rocket bus and exiting Earth's orbit. A NASA spokesperson told Space.com that the team has solid trajectory information for CAPSTONE and handlers are attempting to re-establish contact with the cubesat. 

"If needed, the mission has enough fuel to delay the initial post-separation trajectory correction maneuver for several days," the spokesperson told the site.

CAPSTONE spent six days building up speed in-orbit on a Rocket Lab Electron booster and finally deployed yesterday, on a path to the Moon. The plan is for CAPSTONE to enter a near rectilinear halo orbit around the Moon on November 13th, serving as a test for NASA's Artemis mission. With Artemis, NASA plans to install a space station called the Lunar Gateway in the Moon's orbit, serving as a permanent floating base for lunar visitors, complete with living quarters and a laboratory.

NASA plans to kick off its Artemis 1 mission between August 23rd and September 6th with the deployment of an unmanned Orion module, which will orbit the Moon and provide data about how the trip might affect the human body. After that, four astronauts will take off for the lunar satellite. Finally, some time after 2025, NASA plans to put humans on the Moon again.

Ubisoft will drop details on Assassin's Creed and more games on Sept. 10th

Ubisoft will share updates and announcements about its roster of projects in a showcase on September 10th at 3PM ET. The event will be streamed on Ubisoft channels on YouTube, Twitch and the studio's official website, and it'll include news on "multiple games and projects from Ubisoft teams around the world," according to spokesperson Youssef Maguid.

Back in June, Ubisoft confirmed plans to share information about the future of Assassin's Creed during a special event in September, and this appears to be that. Ubisoft is currently working on two Assassin's Creed projects: one is a live multiplayer experience spanning multiple time periods codenamed Infinity, and the other is a standalone series installment codenamed Rift. Early reports indicate Rift started out as an expansion to Assassin's Creed Valhalla, and it stars Basim Ibn Ishaq from that title.

Alongside Assassin's Creed, Ubisoft is the caretaker of Far Cry, Rabbids, Beyond Good & Evil, Just Dance, Rainbow Six, Ghost Recon, Splinter Cell, Rayman and Prince of Persia. A remake of the original Prince of Persia has been bouncing around Ubisoft's studios for a few years and is now in development in Montreal, due out some time after April 2023.

Ubisoft is also hosting a broadcast for its open-world, online pirate simulator Skull and Bones on July 7th at 2PM ET. Skull and Bones has been kicking around since 2017 and it was even playable in 2018, but updates since then have been few and far between.

Activision Blizzard shareholders approve plan for public report on sexual harassment

Activision Blizzard shareholders on Tuesday approved a plan for the company to release an annual, public report detailing its handling of sexual harassment and gender discrimination disputes, and how the company is working to prevent these incidences. The proposal was initially made in February by New York State Comptroller Thomas P. DiNapoli.

Under the proposal, Activision Blizzard will have to publicly disclose the following information each year:

  • The number and total dollar amount of disputes settled by the studio relating to sexual harassment and abuse, and discrimination based on race, religion, sex, national origin, age, disability, genetic information, service member status, gender identify, or sexual orientation — covering the last three years

  • What steps Activision Blizzard is taking to reduce the average length of time it takes to resolve these incidents internally and legally

  • The number of pending complaints facing the studio relating to sexual abuse, harassment and discrimination, internally and in litigation

  • Data on pay and hours worked, as required by the California Department of Fair Employment and Housing

The DFEH sued Activision Blizzard in July 2020, alleging executives there fostered a culture of rampant sexual harassment and systemic gender discrimination. The US Equal Employment Opportunity Commission also sued the studio over these allegations in 2020, and Activision Blizzard settled with the federal agency in March, agreeing to set up an $18 million fund for claimants. Activists, employees and the DFEH have argued that this settlement is too low, and former employee Jessica Gonzalez appealed the ruling in May. The DFEH estimates there are 2,500 injured employees deserving more than $930 million in compensation.

"For years, there have been alarming news reports that detail allegedly rampant sexual abuse, discrimination, harassment, and retaliation directed toward female employees," a statement in support of the proposal to shareholders reads. As an investor-focused document, it outlines the ways in which systemic discrimination and sexual abuse can damage the studio's revenue streams and its ability to retain employees, saying, "A report such as the one requested would assist shareholders in assessing whether the company is improving its workforce management, whether its actions align with the company’s public statements and whether it remains a sustainable investment."

While Activision Blizzard is facing multiple lawsuits and investigations in regards to sexism, harassment and discrimination, some employees at the studio are attempting to unionize with the help of the Communications Workers of America. This would be the first union at a major video game studio and could signal a shift in the industry's longstanding crunch-centric cycle. At Tuesday's annual meeting, Activision Blizzard shareholders denied a proposal that would've added an employee representative to the board of directors, with just 5 percent voting in favor, according to The Washington Post.

At the same time, Microsoft is in the process of acquiring Activision Blizzard in a deal worth nearly $69 billion. Microsoft has pledged to respect the rights of workers to unionize. And all the while, Activision Blizzard is still making games.

Summer Game Fest: Where did all the AAA games go?

It’s a weird year for video games. We’re 19 months into a fresh console cycle and support for the PS4 and Xbox One is finally tapering off as developers shift focus to the PS5, Xbox Series X and PC cloud gaming platforms. The pandemic slowed or paused development on a generation of games, and studios of all sizes are being absorbed by the biggest names in the room. The industry is in flux and the rest of the year reflects this instability. Put simply, there aren’t a lot of huge games coming out in the second half of 2022.

Right now, the video game space is made up of delays, big promises and more delays. That doesn’t mean there’s nothing to look forward to — between indie and AA developers, cloud libraries and mobile games from Netflix of all companies, this period of transition will still be packed with plenty of things to play.

The 2022 holiday release calendar definitely looks thinner than it did a few months ago, but the first half of the year was fairly busy with games like Horizon Forbidden West, Elden Ring, Pokemon Legends: Arceus, Gran Turismo 7, Kirby and the Forgotten Land and Tiny Tina’s Wonderlands. And those are just the well-funded releases with big, shiny ads — the year has also been good for indie and AA titles like Neon White, The Quarry, The Stanley Parable: Ultra Deluxe, Sifu, Tunic, OlliOlli World and Salt and Sacrifice already available. The summer’s peppered with even more small but fantastic-looking games, like the cyberpunk cat simulator Stray, Sam Barlow’s Immortality and the wildly anticipated Cuphead DLC, all due out by the end of July.

Studio MDHR

Weirdly enough, Netflix is also helping to fill in the gaps with a new push into mobile gaming, and its latest titles are a treat. Poinpy, the new game from the creator of Downwell, is particularly addictive. Netflix is also publishing the next titles from the studios behind Monument Valley and Alto’s Odyssey, and all of them are free, without ads or microtransactions, as long as you have an active Netflix subscription.

On top of all that, mid-tier publishers like Devolver and Annapurna have a steady stream of strange, high-quality games coming out at all times. And, of course, there’s Xbox Game Pass, PlayStation Plus Premium, NVIDIA’s GeForce Now and even Google Stadia — cloud-gaming services that bring hundreds of classic and new titles to essentially any device with a screen.

ustwo

So, yeah, there are plenty of fresh games heading our way this year; it’s just that there won’t be many AAA blockbusters out of Microsoft or Sony. Whether we like it or not, these studios set the pace of the industry, and gaps in their release schedules can make it feel like development has stagnated across the board. And right now, there are a lot of AAA gaps. What makes it worse is the fact that Microsoft and Sony have announced and then abandoned multiple huge projects over the past few years, giving all of us something concrete to miss in every showcase.

In late 2019 and 2020, Microsoft announced massive games including Fable, Senua’s Saga: Hellblade 2, Everwild, Avowed and Outer Worlds 2, and it hasn’t said much more about these projects since. On top of that, there’s everything going on at Bethesda, the largest brand under the Xbox Game Studios banner. Bethesda’s shiny new sci-fi RPG, Starfield, was delayed out of 2022 earlier this year alongside Arkane’s online vampire shooter, Redfall. Meanwhile, it looks like Elder Scrolls 6 has at least five more years left in development, and Fallout 5 may not come out until the next console generation. The biggest Xbox exclusives still landing this year are High on Life, As Dusk Falls and Pentiment, three mid-sized games, two of which were literally announced this month.

Sony is in a similar situation. It has more AAA exclusives hitting the market in the second half of this year than Microsoft, with Forspoken, God of War Ragnarok and The Last of Us remake on the calendar, but there are still plenty of unknowns in the PlayStation lineup. Final Fantasy XVI was a highlight of the PS5 announcement stream in 2020, but we just got a release window of summer 2023 for that one. There’s been zero to little information about other games Sony’s had in the works for years, including Wolverine, the Knights of the Old Republic remake and Spider-Man 2. A standalone multiplayer mode for The Last of Us is still MIA, and we’ve yet to get details on the “multiple game projects” that Naughty Dog is also working on.

There are a couple of big cross-platform games due to come out this holiday season, including Hogwarts Legacy and The Callisto Protocol, but fanfare for these titles has been fairly muted so far.

As for Nintendo, it’s playing by its own rules, as always, and it has Splatoon 3 and Pokemon Scarlet and Violet on the roster this year, plus whatever it announces during its next Direct showcase. It has its own troubles of course — Breath of the Wild 2 was pushed back to 2023, and then there’s Metroid Prime 4, which was announced in 2017 and… yeah.

Nintendo

The sense of insufficiency in the industry this year is the result of the console makers announcing things too early, with too much fanfare and too many impossible release windows. Of course the pandemic didn’t help, but as it stands, these studios promised the world and then went quiet on multiple massive franchises, and the silence is particularly deafening as we enter an anemic six months of AAA releases. Thankfully, there are so many amazing indie games available right now and coming later in 2022, and between cloud, mobile and PC services, there are more ways to play these titles than ever.

As Jonathan Blow would say, time is a construct anyway, and thinking of life in terms of weeks, months and years is a futile effort to logically contain chaos. Long story short, there’s a lot to look forward to in the video game universe. It may not all be coming this year — or the next, or the next — but with more games to play on more platforms than ever, we should all be plenty entertained.

'Time Flies' turns the life of a housefly into a cute game about existential dread

I didn’t expect to laugh while playing Time Flies, but I did, out loud on the Summer Game Fest show floor. It’s a deceptively simple game with monochromatic, MS Paint-style visuals and a clear premise: You’re a fly and you have a short time to live a full life in a random house.

There are layers to the game’s main goal, as the fly has a bucket list filled with items like “learn an instrument”, “read a book”, “make a friend” and “get drunk.” Each of these tasks is completed in a delightfully surprising way — for instance, getting drunk means landing on the base of a martini glass and sipping from the small droplet of alcohol there. Afterward, the screen becomes distorted, warped lines making it harder to fly through the house. Making a friend involves joining a trail of ants as they walk single-file through cracks in the kitchen walls. The fly lands on the back of an ant and it can hang out, disappearing into one small hole and reappearing from the other in a continuous, friendly loop.

And then the fly dies. Every round ends with the fly’s death, whether that’s caused by the inevitable progression of time or the player’s direct actions, such as getting too close to a strip of fly paper, touching a light bulb or drowning in the full martini glass. A timer ticks down constantly in the upper-left corner, starting with 80-odd seconds at most, and when it hits zero, the fly drops to the ground like a speck of dust.

The timer itself presents a compelling thought experiment at the beginning of every life cycle. The length of each round is determined by choosing a location from a dropdown menu of all the countries in the world, and it’s based on the life expectancy of each region. Selecting “United States,” for example, gives players 77.4 seconds because people there are expected to live 77.4 years, according to the database used by the game. This mechanic, beginning every round with a self-inflicted geographic death sentence, grounds the game in reality. It adds weight to whatever silly, pixelated mechanics may follow, mirroring the quiet way that existential dread constantly grips us all.

Knowing you’ll die doesn’t mean you can’t have fun while you’re alive — as the fly, that is. The house is packed with personal items like books, art, instruments and furniture, and to a buzzy little fly, it feels nearly endless. It’s possible to land on certain environments and the screen will zoom in to allow players to interact with the objects there, showing additional detail. The fly can flip the power switch on a phonograph and collect coins inside a bulbous light fixture, each of these new areas appearing as the fly buzzes past or into them.

Michael Frei and Raphaël Munoz

The scene that made me laugh out loud involved a headless mannequin sticking out of the ceiling. Yes, you read that correctly, but this isn’t where I laughed yet. Flying into the dummy’s open neck revealed a network of intestines to escape — funny, but I still hadn’t laughed — with an exit precisely where you’d expect it to be. When the screen shifted from a dark intestinal tract to show the fly popping out of the dangling mannequin’s butt cheeks, I couldn’t help myself. I laughed and heard people watching behind me chuckle, too. Together, we all enjoyed the surprising ridiculousness of this fly’s life, and then it dropped dead.

I had a good time with that fly in particular. I played a few rounds of Time Flies and crossed out a few items on the bucket list, but there’s still so much more to explore in that solitary house. I just need some more time.

Michael Frei and Raphaël Munoz

Time Flies is scheduled to hit PlayStation, Switch and Steam in 2023, developed by Michael Frei and Raphaël Munoz.

'Valheim' is heading to Xbox in the first half of 2023

The hit Viking survival sim Valheim is heading to Xbox and PC Game Pass, complete with full crossplay support with the Steam version of the game. Valheim will hit PC Game Pass first, landing in fall of 2022. It'll come to Xbox Series X and S, and hit Xbox Game Pass same-day in early 2023.

Valheim was a breakout hit of 2021, selling nearly 6 million copies in its first five weeks on Steam Early Access and outstripping established titles like Dota 2 in terms of active players. It ended up as one of the top-earning games on Steam in 2021 overall. The original development team at Iron Gate was just five people, but they've since hired on some more folks.

“We’re doing our best,” Iron Gate co-founder Henrik Tornqvist told Engadget in March 2021. “It has become pretty hectic around here since launch.”

Valheim offers an expansive, collaborative universe of hunting, crafting, sailing, building and defeating mythical Norse beasts, and its launch on Xbox Game Pass marks its debut outside of the Steam ecosystem. With so many players already on Steam, crossplay support is key.

Street Fighter 6's modern controls made me OK at Street Fighter

Thank you, Street Fighter 6. For the first time in my life, I wasn’t embarrassed to play a fighting game in front of strangers on the show floor of a video game convention, and it was all because of the updated control scheme in Street Fighter 6. The modern control type adds simplified inputs to Capcom’s storied fighting game franchise, turning button mashing into an effective art. I’ve never felt so capable playing Street Fighter, at home or on a large screen in front of a bunch of gaming nerds.

The modern control type unleashes special moves by pressing a direction and a face button, and simplifies behaviors like throws and the game’s new Drive moves (more on that in a moment), activating them with a single button press. When playing Ryu, it’s possible to Hadoken with just one button. This is the Smash Bros.-style gameplay I’ve personally been trying to shoehorn into Street Fighter titles for years, and man, it feels good.

I tried out Chun-Li, Jamie, Luke and Ryu with the modern control scheme, and threw out special moves and parried attacks so smoothly that at one point, I actually turned up the difficulty settings for my PC counterpart (impressed gasp). I was promptly beaten, but it took three rounds and I put up an actual fight.

Chun-Li is my favorite Street Fighter character – which usually doesn’t end well for her – and in 6 with the modern control type, she feels faster and more powerful than ever. I ended up using her Tensho Kicks move often, charging toward my opponents and pressing triangle to lift them up with a series of spinning feet to the face, but all of her specials came easily and hit hard.

The Drive Gauge is new to Street Fighter 6 and it’s responsible for all of the graffiti-style visuals you see in trailers. In action, Drive abilities feel just as explosive as they look, and the bursts of color they add to fights are eye-catching without being distracting. The Drive Gauge steadily charges while fighting and players can use it to parry, counter, rush into and absorb attacks, and add extra spice to their special moves. That last ability is called Overdrive Art and is a direct replacement for the EX Special Moves from previous Street Fighter games.

Capcom

Not that I could tell you how to access EX Special Moves in previous Street Fighter games off the top of my head – but playing Street Fighter 6 made me feel like, maybe, I’d be able to figure all of it out. The modern control layout is a fantastic entry point for newcomers to the franchise and folks like me, who have historically relied mainly on button mashing and luck. The modern controls helped me slow down and appreciate each move, and made it easier to connect my inputs with the actions on-screen. I feel like I understand Street Fighter a little better now. I might even try out the classic control type when I pick up Street Fighter 6 – in my living room, not a show floor.

Street Fighter 6 is due to come out in 2023 for PlayStation 4, PS5, Xbox Series consoles and PC via Steam.