Street Fighter IV DLC – Tournaments and Replays

Capcom recently released the free Power Up Pack DLC for Street Fighter IV. This adds a Replay Mode to the game as well as the long awaited Championship Mode, but neither really fulfils what many fans had hoped for.

I’ll begin with the Championship Mode as this was the more anticipated feature among fans of the game. In essence, Championship Mode adds the option to compete in a tournament with other players. Considering that the Street Fighter franchise is famous for its competitive scene you would assume that Championship Mode would be designed to mirror the professional tournaments that take place around the world. It doesn’t.

What Championship Mode does do, is place you into a match with someone in the same tournament tier as you, but, the game then acts very similarly to standard multiplayer. Firstly, there is no new lobby system for tournaments. Rather than selecting Ranked or Player Match you choose Championship and either wait for an opponent or select a match, depending on if you want to host or not. Note how this bypasses a traditional tournament layout. This is because you are not required to fight continuously.

After each round, you are thrown back to the lobby screen to wait for a new opponent. One of the biggest problems with this is that you can end up fighting the same person twice in the same tournament. This happened to me multiple times. After having beaten someone in the first round, I then had to fight them again as between my victory and the network finding a new opponent, the first round loser had secured a win. Obviously, this would be infeasible if the tournament had been structured from the beginning.

Secondly, it is impossible to create a custom tournament. Unlike like regular multiplayer where the person hosting is able to change the length and number of rounds in each battle, Championship Mode sets the rules depending on what tier you are in. Whilst this is understandable for the ranked tournaments, it would have been nice to have some customisation available for the free matches. To remove the ability to customise tournaments even further, you are also unable to play against friends or create a tournament locally, Championship Mode is only playable online.

Both of these problems can be directly linked to the lack of a new lobby system for Championship Mode. By forcing people playing tournaments into what are essentially random battles, there is little difference between Championship Mode and the regular multiplayer. The ability to wait for as long as you want between matches also greatly lessens the reality of what a tournament is.

With all that being said, one positive of Championship Mode is that you can’t see what character your opponent has picked meaning that people are no longer able to take advantage of character match-ups as they can in regular multiplayer.

As well as Championship Mode, the DLC also adds Replay Mode. What this does is allow the winner of each championship to decide whether or not they upload the replay of the victory onto the network. This can then be watched and downloaded (on 360) or voted on (on PS3). Although you can watch, download, or vote on as many replays as you want to, the replays themselves are limited only to championship winners. Who are then only allowed to have one replay uploaded at a time. Whilst this isn’t a major issue, it would be nice to have the opportunity for others to upload replays or for champions with multiple victories to have more than one replay available at a time.

To summarise, the new DLC does not live up expectations. Championship Mode is extremely flawed in its execution and the Replay Mode is somewhat unnecessary. But, it is free so you may as well download it.