Street Fighter 5 guide: Counter and crush counter

Counter

This is a concept best illustrated in slow motion. Birdie begins his hard punch, but it's so slow that Chun-Li, who's pushed medium punch a little bit later, is able to intercept it. You'll see Counter pop up on the screen in this situation.

This happens whenever attacks collide and when a faster attack intercepts a slower attack. Counter hits stun your opponent for a little longer than normal, leading to an advantage — and in some cases a combo possibility.

When you're pressuring a downed opponent, you can use close-range normal attacks to punish them for trying to press any buttons. Mixing this with throws is one basic offensive pattern.

Crush counter

This state is new to Street Fighter 5. It's a way to give the underused Hard attacks a unique strength, and make near invincible moves like the shoryuken riskier than they were before.

As we wrote in its section, the main drawback of a shoryuken is that you're totally open to attack when you land. In Street Fighter 5, you're so open to attack that players can land even more damaging combos than they could by hitting you normally.

As you can see here, landing a heavy attack (usually hard punch or hard kick) on an enemy who's just recovered from an invincible special move causes them to stagger dramatically. This is the crush counter.

Pulling one off increases your V-Gauge a little bit, giving you a useful resource in addition to causing damage. It also makes the huge opening you see here, which in this case led to a small combo. When you see a shoryuken miss, try and get as close as you can to the other player and go for the crush counter.

Combining crush counter and V-Trigger will lead to genuinely devastating damage.

Crush counter will also activate if one of these moves counters normally. It's important to figure out what you can follow up on crush counter with at every range, as you won't always be point-blank for the best possible on-paper combo.

Navigation

1. Intro
2. What am I trying to do in this game?
3. Controls
4. Basic movement
5. Basic attacks
6. The poke game
7. Knockdowns
8. Special moves
9. Control and execution
10. Combos
11. Counter and crush counter
12. Critical meter and critical arts
13. V-System
14. Stun gauge
15. Dealing damage and combos
16. Character select
17. Advanced techniques
18. Good buttons
19. What’s different in Street Fighter 5 Season 2?
20. This is just the beginning