When starting out in Street Fighter 6, the newly-added Drive Impact may seem like an overwhelming move to deal with. It can armor through up to two hits, allowing it to easily counter your combos, and the crumple state it often inflicts can set you up for some punishing follow-up attacks. Even worse, guarding a Drive Impact will send you staggering back which, when backed into a wall, will splat you against it, leaving you just as vulnerable as when you don’t block it. Having said all that, the Drive Impact is far from unbeatable, and this guide will go over the strategies you can use to counter it.
Dealing with Drive Impact
The multi-hit option
One strategy that could help involves using multi-hit moves to beat the Drive Impact’s two-hit armor rule. Attacks like Chun-Li’s Hundred Lightning Kicks or E. Honda’s Hundred Hand Slap can hit the opponent well over two times, allowing you to easily cancel out the Drive Impact.
Having said that, doing this on reaction will likely prove quite challenging. It requires that you have enough time both to anticipate the Drive Impact and input the multi-hit move early enough so that you can land three hits or more before the Drive Impact connects. Whether or not this will work also depends heavily on the length of the startup animation for the multi-hit move. Generally, the shorter the startup, the better.
Using the Drive Gauge
A more useful strategy is one that the game teaches you relatively early on: countering with your own Drive Impact. By inputting the command for the Drive Impact shortly after your opponent initiates the move, you will armor through their Drive Impact and hit them with your own, triggering the crumple state. It’s hard to go wrong with this option, especially since you don’t have to worry about accounting for startup animations like with the multi-hit moves. Simply pressing the input anytime before the opponent’s Drive Impact lands will work, making it easier to pull off on reaction.
Another easy method for staying safe against the Drive Impact on reaction involves using a Drive Parry to block it. Unlike a regular block, the Drive Parry will prevent the Drive Impact from staggering you when it connects, regardless of whether you land a Perfect Parry or not. It won’t necessarily lead to as big of a punish opportunity as the Drive Impact counter does, but it does let you act much more quickly than you can out of a block.
Other strategies that don’t require the Drive Gauge
Alternatively, you can simply jump over the Drive Impact and avoid it entirely. If you jump without holding left or right while next to the opponent, you can even punish them afterward with an aerial move. You do have to input the jump slightly ahead of time to avoid the Drive Impact, though, so if you prefer, you can instead interrupt it with a throw. This comes out instantly and lets you get some free damage in much like with the Drive Impact counter, albeit without as many options for follow-up attacks. Both throwing and jumping have a crucial advantage, though, in that they don’t expend any of your Drive Gauge. So if you find yourself low on Drive Gauge or in a Burnout state, then these strategies can work wonders.
Note that none of these strategies will guarantee that you avoid every Drive Impact throughout the entirety of your time with Street Fighter 6. However, they do make it so that the Drive Impact no longer feels as cheap or overpowered as you might have assumed at first. If you want a visual demonstration of most of the strategies in this guide, you can check out this YouTube short by user KasualZenkai below.
