Marvel Vs. Capcom 3

Broken is such a harsh word. A word like that, when applied to a video game, will usually turn a lot of people off picking it up. It’s funny then that after 10 years on the market, Marvel Vs. Capcom 2 remains one of the most popular tournament level fighting games. Despite cries that it is broken from lots of its players, it has stood the test of time as a fast, exciting, fan-favourite game. Now, a decade later, Marvel Vs Capcom 3 is upon us with a clear message, “If it is broke, fix it!”.

After the wildly popular and hugely successful Street Fighter 4 series dropped in 2009, fighting games have seen a bit of a resurgence. Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 is the first game to ride in on the wave of new fighters set for this year. Depending on your view on Super Street Fighter 4, hearing that all the two games have in common is characters may have you recoiling in disgust or happily hadokening all over again. For the uninitiated, fighting in Capcom’s Vs. series games tends not to be the traditional style of two characters in round based play. Rather, teams of three characters fight against another team of three, using assist moves, tagging in and out and even sharing the stage for screen filling hyper moves. It can look like complete madness to the virgin eye, and to a degree it is. Aware of how tricky a game like this can be to the newcomer, Capcom have included two control schemes. Simple mode makes the leviathan task of working out what you’ve got yourself into a much easier task. In simple mode, there is a button for normal moves, a button for special moves (as an example, a hadoken) a button for hyper moves (Metsu Hadoken) a launch button and your two assist buttons. This still sounds like a lot, but once the basics of how the game works are grasped, pulling off impressive looking combos becomes a walk in the park. Normal mode is similar, except there are no shortcuts. You have three attack buttons, ramping up in power as you go, a launcher for popping people into the air, and your two assist buttons as in simple mode. The control scheme feels very clean and well thought out. Regardless of if your weapon of choice is a pad or an arcade stick, there are button configurations that feel right and allow for massive damage to be a few button presses away. Of all the fighting games I’ve ever played, I feel like Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 has got the input methods perfect. Nothing feels arbitrary, everything the game has you doing feels right in your hands. This is massive to the game’s appeal.

Of course, there is another attractive feature. 36 in fact. The roster of fighters to pick from is as varied as can possibly be, spanning both universes in equal properties. Capcom has done a great job of selecting which characters to include. Throughout the game’s development, they regularly spoke about their selection process. The aim wasn’t primarily to include fighters that would be fan favourites, the aim instead was to have 36 unique characters with no clones. Well, apart from X-23, who is a clone of Wolverine in the Marvel Universe. That aside, they have done an excellent job at achieving their goal. After you spend time with every character you can definitely see this. There are characters with similar properties; Dormammu and Magneto can play excellent keep-away games, Viewtiful Joe and Arthur have a height advantage (or disadvantage), Chun-Li and X-23 play a blistering rush-down game. Amazingly, even though characters fit into traditional fighting game archetypes, everyone is unique. Also, there’s not a dud in the bunch. I may look back at that statement in a year and cringe at how wrong I was, due to the nature of high level play. I hope and believe though that this won’t be the case. Any team construct feels viable, though admittedly some have better chemistry than others.

For those for whom arcade mode is more their thing than versus play, you’ll be nicely rewarded with pretty well-made A.I. to fight. The battles ramp up nicely throughout a play-through, ending with an absolutely devastating boss fight with Galactus, consumer of worlds. The fight takes place in two stages. First, you fight a clone of one character from the game, such as Akuma, Dr. Doom, or Dormammu. In other words, the baddies. Once you get that character’s health down a bit, the game doubles the difficulty by making you fight two of these clones at once. This becomes a tricky, brain dividing task. Secondly, once you down his assistants, Galactus in his giant form strides over and decides to deal with you himself. This is by far one of the most difficult boss fights I’ve ever fought in a fighting game. Huge damage, huge health and moves that will make you yell all sorts of expletives at your TV. Galactus is bullshit, but a fun, challenging and overwhelming piece of bullshit that makes you feel like a god when you take him down.

Talking additional features in a fighting game is tough. Marvel Vs. Capcom 3’s online features are all there, but leave much to be desired. If you join a lobby, you can’t watch games in progress, only see health bars shown in real time at the side of the screen. The lobby system has no kick feature. When using the arcade request feature, you’re never told who you’re playing until the start of the match, or shown their connection status at all. In other words, you can’t avoid laggy, unplayable games. It all seems a bit slapdash, which is odd. I’d expect this if the game was being made for arcades and then ported. However, when other console fighters, including those made by the exact same development studio, have robust and satisfying online features it boggles the mind why Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 has been left behind in this regard. Four of the game’s characters have to be unlocked by earning player points. It’s arbitrary and unnecessary, however it doesn’t take too long. It pains me to say it, but the game package feels messy. Imagine as a child receiving the best toy ever, but it’s wrapped in tin foil and the box is covered in something sticky. It doesn’t make the toy any less awesome, but there was some brief unpleasantness to get to it. With a bit of luck Capcom will patch in the missing online features to mimic the Super Street Fighter IV feature set.

In all, Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 is an excellent game. It’s fun, frantic and fast-paced. A perfect jumping on point for fighting game newbies, and packed full of tricky and high-level stuff to keep those more invested in the scene happy. A great cast, wonderful controls and gorgeous, screen-filling action make Marvel Vs. Capcom 3 great. Some hurried design elsewhere keeps it from being perfect, made worse by these flaws being in stark contrast to rest of the package.


Posted

in

,

by

Tags:

Comments

3 responses to “Marvel Vs. Capcom 3”

  1. DeltorroElSorrow avatar
    DeltorroElSorrow

    Definitely a buy for me.

    Good review mate!

  2. Mark P avatar

    This is hopefully a Day -1 buy. Don’t fail me now, postie!

  3. Lauren avatar
    Lauren

    I couldnt help but lol at the last image XD NOM NOM NOM!

    *Ahem* Same here Mark, fingers crossed we get our copies tomorrow! But our postie hates m >:(

    It is hard to believe its been 10 years since the last MvC game and I was only playing it just last week, its a regular beat-em up round my fellas house! Im more of an old skool fighting gamer and I did enjoy playing the preview of MvC3. Like you said its fun and you can just jump right in!

    Im glad youve given it a good review Kami 🙂 Because you could have gone the other way and slated it and I know some out there will *shakes fist*

    *pssst* Your cheques in the post *nod*

Leave a Reply