Recommended but on a big discount.

I was a big fan of Soul Calibur 2 and 4 in the past, so wanted to try this one as well. Soul Calibur series has its fair share of interesting and unique characters, each using their own unique weapon type and fighting style. And not to mention that the latter instalments also have the character creation mode to make your own characters to use in the game.

Now I don't tend to play online, so this review is based on single-player experience only.

This instalment boasts a wide selection of characters, as before. If you already have your favourites from the previous games, you'll find their fighting style still feels familiar and comfortable to use, but also with some new moves. Generally the flow of the fights is great, as you can string some good combos, move in 8-directions, combo and parry, and also perform special moves. The execution of the special moves can cause a bit of a break in the pacing due to them either going into slow motion or being like a mini-cutscene, though most times I didn't mind it too much.

What I find kind of disappointing is the lack of interesting game modes and challenges. There's only an arcade mode, which is actually a time attack mode renamed. Previous games in the series had a bigger variety of modes. For example, Soul Calibur 2 had arcade, time attack and survival mode, not to mention these same modes could be tackled with each character's unique weapons with different bonuses and drawbacks, which often drastically changed the gameplay. Or like Soul Calibur 4 with its brutal Tower of Lost Souls that put us against creative challenges.

There are two separate campaign modes here though. One of them allows us to play the core background story of each character. The other has us create a new character with creation tools and undertake an adventure. But I personally found both of those to be uninteresting. There's a lot of narration and dialogue going on with text and still character portraits before you get to the battles. Usually when I want that, I play visual novels, which have much more interesting storylines. In a fighting game, you want to get into the action quickly, without long breaks of story info dump in between. I think actual cutscenes might've served the story modes better here, but even they would've needed to be short and to the point.

The visuals are generally great. Nice selection of outfits for characters and character creation (there's plenty of eye candy for anyone), and beautiful environments. Music and voice acting are both decent too. I would've liked to feel more impact and oomph from strikes though, particularly with better-chosen sound effects, but what's there is ok.

Overall, as far as core fighting mechanics go and presentation, Soul Calibur 6 is great, but I personally think it needed more game modes and challenges. Again, I didn't play online, but I can't imagine that many people are playing this game nowadays as it's several years old now. So for this reason I recommend it only when it goes on a big discount.

very decent game for the ones who grew up with ps1 and ps3
recommend 9/10

John Calibur finds and takes the EVIL SWORD!!!!!!!!!! The EVIL SWORD makes him EVIL!!!!!!!!!!!!!! He starts EVILing all over the place and becomes the EVIL SEED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! (or somethin idk).

Then John Soul somehow gets caught up in all this and his best friend (I think????) gets murdered by people that became EVIL because of the EVIL SEED!!!!!!!!!! So now John Soul realizes that he has to go and break the EVIL SWORD so that way people stop EVILing all over the place.