The Street Fighter 6 Open Beta launched on May 19, and I was finally able to play it this morning, on May 20th (you know, work, life, etc).

The Open Beta was my first chance to experience Street Fighter 6. The gameplay for the Open Beta takes place within the Battle Hub, the game’s virtual community / lobby where you can interact with and challenge other players.

Before you get to the battle hub, however, you are able to create your own customized avatar. For avatar creation, you can select Male, Female or Human as your gender identity, and then mix and match a rather wide variety of skin tones, hair styles and body types to create the perfect avatar to represent you in Street Fighter 6.

I didn’t spend a ton of time in the avatar creator, as I was recording my gameplay and I wanted to jump into the game relatively quickly, but once the actual game releases I may spend a bit more time crafting my perfect avatar.

Here is the avatar I created. He’s somewhere between Akuma and a… who the heck knows. LOL.

The Battle Hub itself is very cool. It’s like a super interactive game lobby, where you can find in game machines to play at and then either challenge someone already sitting at a machine, or find an empty machine to sit down at and wait for a challenger. It’s almost like a Street Fighter-themed Metaverse, and it’s easy to see how someone could spend hours hanging out, chatting with and challenging other players. The Battle Hub even has a retro arcade area that you can play in, with a set number of machines, and according to the information in the game it appears it will cycle through different classic arcade games over time. When I played it featured Magic Sword and I played through the first 3 levels before exiting to challenge a few more fighters.

Now how is Street Fighter 6 itself? Well outstanding actually.

You can choose from a variety of control styles, from the classic six-button action you know and love, to more modern control styles that are streamlined a bit. Of course I chose the classic control style, and I noticed a lot of other players chose it as well, but selecting it as your playstyle was a little more challenging. Before you start challenging other players, make sure to go into the game options and adjust your control scheme and selected fighter, as that will be the default when you challenge other players.

In the Open Beta you can select from eight different characters:

• Luke
• Jamie
• Ryu
• Juri
• Kimberly
• Guile
• Ken
• Chun-Li

You might be afraid of how challenging it will be to play against other people, but honestly I found a pretty good mix. I challenged some players who wiped the floor with me, others who provided a good challenge that I could beat if I practiced more, and others that I wiped the floor with time-after-time. Honestly felt a bit like being in an actual arcade back in the day.

So far my time with the Open Beta has been excellent and has rekindled my interest in picking up Street Fighter 6 when it releases. It’s a really good time, and it’s honestly going to be hard to balance my time between it and Mortal Kombat 1 when it releases in September.

If you want to see some of my gameplay from my time so far with the Open Beta, you can checkout the video below:

If you are interested in checking out the Open Beta yourself, just make sure to do it by tomorrow, May 21, as that is the final day it will be running.

Hope to see you out there.