Diablo IV, Street Fighter 6, and More: The Video Games Wirecutter Is Playing in June 2023

Street Fighter 6
Rated T; PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S (out now)

I’ve been playing Street Fighter 6 for the past two weeks, and I feel transported back to a ’90s laundromat, pumping quarters into the most exciting game a generation of kids had ever seen. A simplified set of controls lets more casual players perform the series’ tricky special moves via single button presses. This means new players can keep up with expert players (though dedicated fans shouldn’t worry—you can stick with the classic controls).

Also included is an open-world-inspired adventure mode that lets you create and fully customize just about any kind of fighter you can imagine. You then take your created challenger into Metro City, where you challenge other fighters, meet the Street Fighter cast and study their techniques, and unravel a growing mystery.

But the real stars of the show are the characters, which are as diverse and cool as in any entry in the series since the second installment wowed the world more than 30 years ago. This is the best Street Fighter has felt in decades, and it plays great with either a controller or a fighting stick. It’s stylish and fun, top to bottom.

—Arthur Gies

Diablo IV
Rated M; PC, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X|S (out now)

It’s been a long 10 years since Diablo III hit PCs, and according to reviewers, the classic action RPG franchise has returned to form. Diablo IV brings the influential series fully into the modern era, with a heavier emphasis on story (including cutscenes featuring your custom character) and a sweeping, beautiful, and often haunting soundtrack.

Deceptively simple to play, Diablo IV has you select from five different character classes—the melee-focused barbarian, the ranged-magic sorcerer, the undead-army-summoning necromancer, the shape-shifting druid, and the shadow-dwelling, bow-wielding rogue—each of which have their own abilities and class-specific tools and treasures. You make your way through the world of Sanctuary as you seek to stop Lilith, a demonic goddess with a dark plan. To interact with the world, you merely click with your mouse, whether you’re opening a chest or a door, crawling into a cave, entering a dungeon, or smashing a skeleton to pieces, but things expand from there. And this is the first Diablo game to be designed from the start for playing on a controller, which works amazingly well, even on PC. Diablo IV’s take on the series’ classic loot-driven dopamine dispenser is as efficient as ever in extracting hours of your time before you realize what’s happening.

—Arthur Gies

Final Fantasy XVI

Rated M; PlayStation 5 (June 22)

Let’s get this out of the way first: The PlayStation 5–exclusive Final Fantasy XVI is a big departure from one of the most popular and influential game franchises of all time. To be fair, many of the elements that have made Final Fantasy an international institution—the beautifully designed characters, the high drama, the sweeping soundtrack—are still present. But Final Fantasy XVI is also heavily influenced by Game of Thrones, as it has a new, darker tone that involves profanity and graphic, bloody violence.

For more enthusiastic Final Fantasy fans, though, the bigger change lies in how the newest game plays. Rather than asking you to control a party of adventurers, or even loosely coordinating them, Final Fantasy XVI’s gameplay is entirely oriented around controlling and outfitting a single character, game protagonist Clive. And continuing the evolution of the series, the action is no longer turn-based, instead reflecting an active combat resembling that of games like the recent God of War revival.

After spending five hours with a close-to-final version of the game, I’m pretty optimistic about how it’s shaping up. The presentation is suitably epic most of the time, the characters are interesting, the magic is breathtaking, and the combat is fun, if a bit simplistic. If you’re on the fence about whether these changes are too much for you, I recommend waiting for final reviews around launch, but it’s definitely on our radar in a busy, busy month for games.

—Arthur Gies

The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom
Rated E; Nintendo Switch (out now)

If you’re on TikTok or any other social media platform, The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom has been more or less inescapable—and for good reason. Tears of the Kingdom’s powerful building system has unleashed a flood of creative puzzle solutions, wild contraptions, and … war crimes?

You don’t have to have a degree in engineering or a supervillain’s sadistic streak to enjoy Tears of the Kingdom. There’s still a Zelda game here. It builds on the giant open world full of exploration and experimentation that 2017’s Breath of the Wild brought to the series, enhancing it with building abilities that let you combine weapons into new tools and attach ingredients to your arrows for wild new effects. Tears of the Kingdom brings the problem-solving inventiveness of games like Minecraft and Fortnite to Zelda, to always-surprising effect. It’s frequently impressive if not always predictable. There’s also an epic, time-traveling story that remixes and refines the themes and beats that the series has become known for. After around 40 hours with the game, I’m still only scratching the surface, as I’m constantly pulled between progressing the story and clumsily attempting to get my Hylian degree in mechanical engineering.

—Arthur Gies

This article was edited by Arthur Gies and Caitlin McGarry.