Street Fighter Alpha

It is said that the pinnacle of engineering is not designing something to a point where there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away.

It appears Capcom and Gameloft may have taken this mantra slightly too far with the latest Street Fighter game to hit mobile.

While Street Fighter Alpha looks close to the original arcade game, the simplified controls and lack of characters make it feel like a backwards step.

There’s no denying that the game looks absolutely fantastic. The fully animated backgrounds and the large, bright, detailed characters are an almost perfect replication of the original arcade game.

While it’s debatable whether the animation frames are identical, if you find yourself worrying about such a thing then this isn’t the game for you anyway.

This is because, despite the name and graphics matching the arcade game, it’s hard to say the game plays or feels anything like it.

Gone is the excellent and innovative control scheme from the Pocket Gamer Bronze Award-winning Super Street Fighter 2 that managed to replicate the controls of the original game.

In SFA all your characters' special moves are assigned to one-button presses along the ‘*’, ‘0’, and ‘#’ keys at the bottom of the keypad, while one 'punch' button is assigned to ‘5’ and two kicks are possible by pressing ‘9’ and ‘7’.

This culling of buttons definitely makes the game more approachable for newcomers, even if the 'crouch' button is now more awkward to use, but it also has the unfortunate effect of making fights incredibly shallow.

It’s not just the controls that have been shown the door from the previous version though.

While the character list on SSF2 was brimming with playable characters, Alpha only has six to choose from. What's more, three of them – Ryu, Ken and Akuma – share the exact same special moves.

This leads to a slightly disappointing Arcade mode that can be breezed through in under ten minutes, with no real incentive to return other than a place on the high score chart.

Ultimately, your enjoyment of Street Fighter Alpha hinges on what you want from a mobile fighting game.

Whereas the previous version managed to squeeze every drop of the arcade into the handset at the expense of instant accessibility, Alpha is immediate, attractive, and easy to enjoy.

It’s just that with so many of the more ‘skillful’ elements of the game removed it doesn’t take long for the limited character list, samey fighting styles, and special move spamming to wear thin.