The Marvel vs Capcom series of games is highly respected in the fight game community, despite the total lack of balance in the second game in the series. The variety of characters from both universes, especially in the second game, and the fast-paced gameplay, made them really fun and popular games.

After 11 years of waiting and hype, we finally get to play the next installment in the series. The previews made it look awesome, and the constant character reveals and videos just kept the hype up all the way since it was announced.

I’m by no means a fighting game expert, but I’ve played a large variety of them and I’m competent enough to distinguish the good from the bad.

So read on and see if I enjoyed this one!

Developer: Capcom
Publisher: Capcom
Date of Release: February 15th 2011
Platforms: Xbox 360, PS3

Genre: Fighting Game
Rated T for Teen

What’s good about the game

Fighting System
The fighting system here is really good. There’s quite a few options here, some that will be familiar to old MvC players, though a lot works differently.

The basics are simple: 3 attack buttons, light, medium and heavy, a special button that acts as a launcher and 2 assist buttons. Doing quarter and half-circles, as well as the dragon-punch motion, with any of the attack buttons, you launch special moves, just like in any other “2D” fighting game. Doing the same motions and pressing 2 attack buttons uses one hyper bar (or 3) and launches a hyper attack. Getting hit lowers your life, and most attacks will leave you with a red segment in your life bar, which will regenerate if you switch the character out. You can block by holding back on the d-pad/stick, and pressing 2 attack buttons while blocking does an Advanced Guard, which will push you away from your opponent.

An important side of this game is fighting in the air. Compared to most other fighting games, here you spend most of your time in the air. You have both normal and standard attacks in the air, but the biggest change in this game is the ability to smash enemies in the ground, or the ability to tag-in your allies into the battle and extending your air combo by pressing the special button and a direction (it can be defended the same way too). This builds up your hyper meter, and can deal massive damage if you use it well.

On the assist side, just pressing the buttons calls your assist to do the attack you selected in the character select screen (some assists have special effects as well). If you tag out a character who used a hyper move that gives them a power boost, they keep it if you call them as an assist, which can be insanely useful. Be careful using your assist though, because they can get hit and they receive 1.5 times the damage than they would normally from attacks (essentially making assists die, or close to that, if they get hit by a Hyper attack). Holding the assist buttons enable you to switch characters. While blocking, pressing forward and a partner button unleashes a counter move (which switches your character at the same time). The best thing with the assists is that, during your own hyper move, you can enter the commands for another hyper move, and that will call over another character to do his own hyper move. This is a great way to safely switch characters, and deal extra damage. Oh, and doing a quarter-circle forward and pressing an assist button does an attack that switches out your opponent’s character, but it costs you one bar. Experimenting with assist is crucial to becoming good at the game.

A new element is the X-factor. It’s well deserving of the name, as it can mean the difference between victory or defeat. By pressing all 4 attack buttons, you activate X-factor. This gives you increased speed, attack power, prevents chip damage if you’re blocking, and you get some health regeneration (the red segment). Depending on how many characters you have left alive in your team, the effectiveness of the X-factor changes. The X-factor can also be used to cancel whatever move you’re doing, including a hyper move, and instantly do whatever you want. You can also X-factor cancel from a block (can be useful if you’re blocking and you cancel into an invincible or near-instant hyper). There’s multiple uses to the X-factor, and it can easily turn the match around, thus being the “x-factor” to deciding the victor of the match.

Overall, the fighting system is really well-made. Figuring out combos, both with and without assists is loads of fun, and the cast of characters offers a lot of variety. Since most moves link into one another, creating combos is fairly easy.

Easy to learn, hard to master
Since the actual fighting uses only 4 main buttons, it’s very easy to learn. There’s no tutorials or anything, but there’s tons of resources online to learn how to play the game. The one I use is the shoryuken.com MvC3 wiki, at http://wiki.shoryuken.com/Marvel_vs_Capcom_3, it’s very well made and has not only basic tutorials, but character-specific strategies. A bit of reading, as well as watching online videos from tournaments, I find is a great way to learn the game. You’ll learn new combos, different strategies and I find that it’s actually quite easy to learn and use new combos. You can also go in the mission mode, where you can learn a variety of combos for each character.

While it might look complicated and hard to play in various videos, it’s definitely not as bad as it looks. Oh, and don’t even bother with the Simple control mode, it removes just about every attack a character has. What’s the point?

Characters
In general, I think Capcom did a great job with the roster here. Sure, 36 isn’t exactly as much as 56 characters in the MvC2 roster, but here I feel that every character in the roster is more fleshed-out and overall more balanced. All the characters are fun to play as, and all of them have their good and bad points. The selection is really good.  For some time at least I feel that we’ll be seeing fairly varied teams. Sure, for now, Sentinel, Wolverine, Akuma and Dante seem to be in a lot of people’s teams, but that’s usually in combination with other characters.

Visuals
The characters look awesome. I have trouble calling the style cel-shading, since it’s so much more stylized. Everything looks more like comic books than cartoons like cel-shading usually looks. It’s incredibly colorful, the backgrounds are nicely detailed and fun to look at, though there’s sadly not a lot of levels. The animation is almost flawless, with every move flowing really well from one to the next. The screen is constantly getting filled with stuff going on and there’s never any slowdown, which is fantastic. Nothing bad here. All the characters, no matter the different art styles and designs, look great together. Wacky guys like Arthur feel right in place with more normal-looking characters like Phoenix because the overall graphical style is great.

Things that might need work

Balance
It’s still very hard to say if the game is balanced at the moment, since the game is still in its infancy. At first glance, the cast seems fairly well balanced. Or, at the very least, all the characters seem useable enough so that none of them is useless. For example, while Arthur might seem useless due to his low mobility, his variety of projectiles makes him more than a match against the other characters.

Currently, Sentinel seems to be the only character I can see that might be disrupting the balance. He has a huge amount of health and his attacks deal massive damage, he has super armor on various of his attacks which makes his close-combat skills harder to deal with, and he has very strong keepaway abilities. He can generally defeat any character in one combo (heck, he can kill Pheonix in 3 hits), and his combos are really easy to do, so much so that they require no effort to do. While he’s not totally broken, he does upset the balance a bit. Most other characters have to work harder than usual to be able to defeat him.

It’s still way too early to say but, as it stands, it feels like no one character really overpowered enough to destroy the game’s balance on his own. Even Sentinel… he just requires a bit more work to fight against.

On the other hand, X-factor is way too powerful. I’ve seen full teams losing against a single, near-death opponent, just because he had a level 3 X-factor activated. That might be a bit much. It’s literally something that can turn the match around from a total beatdown from one side to a total beatdown from the other side. It’s really way too strong.

Defensive options
There’s not a lot of defensive options here. You can block, and you have a few options while blocking (Advance Guard, Crossover Counter)… And you can stop the Team Aerial Combos as I mentioned above. That’s about it. If you get stuck in a combo, there’s nothing you can do about it. Other games tend to have some kind of Burst system which can get you out of combos once per match, but that’s nowhere to be found here. Though that’s part of the strategy, it can get annoying getting caught in a big combo and basically having no way of getting out.

What’s bad about the game

Lack of Single-player content
There’s basically nothing to do in single-player. You have arcade mode, which offers 36 short endings, none of which are overly interesting (all of them are just 2 images and some random text), you have training mode, and you have mission mode where you can learn a few combos for each character and…. that’s it. You can’t even fight the CPU in Versus mode, you have to go in the training mode and change the settings if you want a normal versus fight. Capcom talked about there being a big story mode, but that’s nowhere to be found, there’s basically no story whatsoever… not a big problem, since story is never important in fighting games (which are more about the fighting system and the competitive nature of the games than any kind of plot), but to promise an epic story and not deliver is kinda cheap. I tend to enjoy playing fighting games alone, to practice before playing with my friends. Sure, I can go in the training mode, but it’s annoying having to change the settings every time.

*EDIT* But the addition of the Shadow Battle DLC (which is free… for now…) does add a bit of that versus mode stuff I was talking about, now I can practice against at least one good CPU (the other 2 are bad though) with a set strategy. Hopefully they continue releasing those, they’re a nice feature.

Overall

Marvel vs Capcom 3 is incredibly fun to play. The pace is really fast, but surprisingly manageable. The comboing is simple, though it does require really precise timing. The cast of character is interesting and varied, with characters that can make any Capcom and Marvel fan happy. Each of them are interesting to play as in their own right, and each of them, for now at least, seems like viable characters to use in battle. Balance might become an issue eventually, but it’s basically impossible to say at the moment. For now at least, the game feels fairly balanced.

The only big problem with the game is the near complete lack of single-player content. Some people complained about the lack of tutorials, but the internet exists, use it!

Overall, to me at least, it definitely lived up to the hype.

Pros and Cons

Pros
- Awesome fighting system
- Good cast of characters
- Fairly easy to learn
- Great visuals

Cons
- Netcode needs some optimizing, it always lags like crazy when I go online
- No single player content

jobocan Console, ps3, Review, xbox 360