Cammy is too strong for how easy she is to play in Street Fighter 5

We're a few months into the current season of Street Fighter 5 now and many of us feel like the game is in a better place than it ever has been, perhaps save for a few sore thumbs.

With V-Shift and a few other crucial changes (such as the dampening of certain V-Triggers and increased risk associated with using heavier attacks) seem to have made Street Fighter 5 much more about calculated and patient approaches than in the past, but one character in particular is threatening to throw a wrench into the works.

The Killer Bee has been a top tier contender for most all of SF5's five year lifespan, garnering a reputation for being needlessly buffed over the first few seasons. She was one of the most prevalent picks in tournaments for a long while, but received a few nerfs in more recent years that caused her to fall to a strong but palatable overall status.

General tier list opinions for Season 5 have varied a good bit across the board as notable figures from around the world have chimed in with their two cents, but almost all of them have Cammy in the top three, and many place her as a matter-of-fact best in the game.

Someone has to be on the top of the mountain, surely, but we take some issue with a character like Cammy being that someone simply because of how relatively simple she is to use. This is a discussion that has come up multiple times on our weekly podcast, and seeing Cammy take down the first Capcom Pro Tour Online event of the year ignited the flames once again.

The idea here is that, especially in a time when fighting game developers have ongoing control of balance via regular updates, expectations for the kinds of characters who reign at the top are strict. If a fighter is particularly easy to pick up and use, meaning they're not very technical and their strengths aren't difficult to quickly start implementing and benefiting from, they should have a relatively lower ceiling than those who are more difficult.

If one character is both easy to use and easy to win with, there's a very strong chance other characters won't get the time of day from players who, understandably, want to take the path of least resistance. Not only might this harm diversity in the game, but we've seen before (with Cammy, Rashid, and others) just how frustrating for everyone else facing a seemingly infinite army of one overly powerful character feels like.

Cammy's strengths are many, and she absolutely can play an honest footsie game that's comprised of precise whiff punishes and smart spacing. On the other hand, she can also zip up to the skies at almost any time and resort to getting in with her dive kick, then proceed into dial-in offense pressure that grants a ton of reward.

While it is still fairly early in the season, Cammy's CPT performance and tier chart placements are starting to raise red flags. She likely isn't as big of an offender as some of the worst cases in previous seasons, but with SF5 feeling as good as it does right now, we'd hate to see it get tripped up by a rather obvious blunder.

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