As a 1v1 fighting game, it's good enough.
You'll have fun with the characters and mechanics that come with the Guilty Gear series.
As a video game overall, it is severely barebones in comparison to it's predecessors.
Guilty Gear to me personally has been known for it's gameplay, it's really out there characters, and mode variety all the way back to the original release of Accent Core on the PlayStation 2.
In Accent Core, each character had their own story mode and arcade mode to go through with branching paths for story mode on top of awesome custom battle intros with certain fights in story that could leave you in an advantageous or disadvantageous position before a fight started.
The M.O.M. Mode really became awesome in Xrd to Rev 2 where it added more RPG elements such as stat upgrades, weaknesses and resistances, and consumable items to spice up the matches.
I bring these modes and nuances up to point because Strive has none of them, or barely a fraction of what made them cool to begin with.
M.O.M. is still missing from this game after five years. That is unacceptable. Enough Said.
Arcade in this one bleeds story mode and arcade mode together, but you'll really only get three fights that have any bearing on the lore of it all. The way it branches also sucks. You just need to win rounds without losing one in a match. Branching in Accent Core had you win with certain conditions, like timeout, having massive health leads, OR, my personal favorite, winning by an instant kill... which by the way has been a staple mechanic that's been in every game in the series... except this one...
The story mode in Accent also had various fighting conditions, such as characters having infinite tension, regenerating health, not being able to jump, etc. Here though, your only curveball is a boss character that has high defense, health, and damage output, and that's for every character in arcade, and a lot of characters have the same boss fight too. Also, the fight itself is just not fun regardless of which boss your character gets in their arcade.
Now, with the addition of the FOMO battle pass, still being unable to lab against DLC characters you don't own, AND STILL no M.O.M. mode, I really can't recommend this as a video game because it's just so lacking in content outside of online play.
If you want a 1v1 fighter for online play, it's fine, but don't expect it to offer anything else other than that.
