Street Fighter 6’s best new feature takes cues from Mortal Kombat

digitaltrends.com:

Street Fighter 6‘s recent beta left an amazing impression on me and, according social media chatter, lots of other fans too. The upcoming fighting game has already delivered on many fronts, even during its beta, with stylistic battles and a thoughtful social integration.

For fans of the genre though, much of the conversation is centered around the game’s universal battle mechanic, called Drive Impact. This system is broken into five separate pieces that can be used in different creative ways, which adds a lot of extra flavor to matches. I can see the DNA of several other fighting games present in the system, as Drive pulls some of the best ideas from previous Street Fighter games and even Mortal Kombat.

When playing Street Fighter 6, you’ll immediately notice a meter right under your character’s life bar. This is the Drive Gauge. The gauge has six bars and players will lose a tick of it when they use a Drive skill, get hit by attacks while blocking, or are countered after whiffing an attack. Just as you can lose ticks, you can gain them back by successfully Drive Parrying, or simply waiting for it to replenish over time.

When the Drive system was originally unveiled, I thought it would replicate Street Fighter 4‘s Focus Attack system. While it’s ultimately different from that system, there is one similarity. Like Focus, Drive Impact activates super armor, which absorbs a select number of incoming hits and knocks the opponent down, giving players enough time to get a free combo in. This throws another mind game into the flow of battle, just as Focus Attack did in Street Fighter 4.

Drive Impact’s biggest fear factor comes from its usage in corners. If you’re hit with this technique, even while blocking in the corner,