Tencent Games · Feb 27, 2023
Idle games can be a difficult genre to review. For starters, it is a very niche genre, as the gameplay loop consists of large periods of downtime between either pushing for new ground or restarting in an acension manner. As a team-building idle game, Street Fighter: Dual falls into the former camp. It has a focus on building the strongest team using a mix of different characters from the Street Fighter franchise. Each team consists of 4 characters, with 3 playing an active role from the beginning and 1 coming in as backup if a member is knocked out. You will also unlock additional specials and bonus support slots to further your active team's damage and survivability. There is a hearty amount of PVE content, so you never have to engage with the PVP whales. That being said, big kudos to Capcom for making the game free-to-play friendly, or at least making it feel that way. You have several opportunities to unlock characters, from story completion to completing mini-events. Another big component that I liked was that you can (somewhat) choose the character that you unlock when you pull a rare character by having a wishlist. While this doesn't increase your odds of a rare in general, it does increase the odds of the character you desire when it is pulled. This is an important feature because there are several ways having certain characters or a certain amount of the same character is useful. This includes, but is not limited to, being able to upgrade the current character with enough copies of the same copies and bonuses to the character if you own a copy of a specific character. The last thing that makes it distinctive is the combo system. You can arrange your characters to use their super meter (which is built up by attacking enemies and taking damage) in a specific fashion, such as by executing your favorite street fighter attacks. Some things that I liked were the amount of things to do. In Most instances, content is not a bad thing; however, at some point it becomes excessive, and here it feels that way. There were so many concurrent events with rewards that felt out of reach that it was insane. At one point, there was an item that I was prompted to buy for $99.99 (oh, but it was on a 50% sale, so that makes it okay (sigh)). You never have to purchase anything, but engaging in most of the PVP modes makes you realize that some wallets are built differently. The last huge con was that item navigation was not super clear. At one point, I felt I was behind a progression wall, but little did I realize that I was sitting on a mountain of resources that had been stored since I started playing. When progression walls hit, they hit hard. Granted, the process of breaking them does feel great. Overall, Street Fighter: Duel is an enjoyable experience. There are a few quirks with the game, but many of them come packaged with the genre. I had a lot of fun mixing and matching fighters and looking for a good combination of support and DPS. Given its friendly F2P nature (at least for the first 5 hours), I would say fans of the genre should check it out.
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