True Believers unite, ten years after the release of Marvel vs Capcom 2 finally comes the 3rd installment in the series! After the franchise went into limbo all it needed was the complete revitalization of the 2d fighter genre for them to actually green light a 3rd game. Once again both the Capcom and Marvel universes are in great danger. The heroes will once come together in tag-teams of 3 characters to fight epic battles. Will they make a good and the win the battle for a worthy sequel or will they fall apart leaving a huge clunker in their wake.

The first thing I noticed when I put the game into the drive and started up a random arcade match was the controls got big overhaul. Well it’s an overhaul if you haven’t played Tatsunoko vs Capcom that came out on the Wii in 2010. So if you’re only coming from last playing Marvel vs Capcom 2 you’re in for a bit of a shock. The controls have been streamlined so it’s easier to pick up for the less diehard player. While that might sound bad the change doesn’t really make you lose any depth it just makes it simpler to understand for first time players. How it works now is that you’ve just got 3 attack buttons, light, medium and heavy with no more nothing differentiating between whether it’s a punch or kick. On paper this might sound like a bad thing but it doesn’t really hurt the gameplay and you can spend your time learning the heart of game and what Marvel vs Capcom is known, it’s insane combos.

The game is easy to pick up quickly if you’re familiar with fighting games, especially Capcom ones. The combos are just as important as they’ve always been and you’ll be spending hours learning how to chaining your moves and partner attacks so they do the absolute most damage in a single combo. If the easier controls still aren’t basic enough there’s the Simple control scheme that really bring the game down to the basics. They designed it so the game will automatically chain together moves that form a combo; there are buttons dedicated to your character moves and hyper combo special move attacks so you don’t even need to learn the characters move. While the Simple controls might have some value to somebody who rarely plays video games I couldn’t find much use for it myself and I felt like I was having less fun because I didn’t have complete control over what my character was doing. Some more ways the game has been shaken up is the addition of the “special attack” which is your way of launching your opponent into the air trying to perform some air combos on him. I found it to be a really fun mechanic to mess around with and try and see what I could chain together. Another new mechanic is the inclusion of the X-Factor power-up; any time in the match you can hit all four attack buttons to activate it. What it does is for a limited amount of time depending on how many of the 3 partners you have left turning them super powered, that is faster, doing more damage and recovering some of your red health bar which only recover if you’re not the active partner. So you can either use it near the start of the match and have the advantage of being able to also combo in partner attacks or use it later on as a last ditch effort making yourself pretty hard to finish off. The games still includes a lot of the same mechanics from the 2nd game like Advancing Guard that pushes your opponent while you block, Snap Back which brings out any one of your opponent’s partner of you choice and throws a staple for most fighting games.

I spent a lot of time talking about the technical aspects of the game and that can tell you a lot but it doesn’t add up to much if I don’t try to put it in to context. In practice all the mechanics work really well. The game is easy to pick, you can check the manual or the menu screen to lookup the moves but they’re not all that complicated. Just messing around feels rewarding and you might string together some random combos if you’re lucky. This is the type of game you can just get a bunch of friends together who don’t know what they’re doing and you’ll have a blast even you only know a little about fighting games. It’s easy to start playing but the fighting system seems to have tons of depth, far more than I can pretend to have scratched playing casually. The CPU can be fun to play against but it’s definitely not nearly as fun as playing with people. The game is definitely fast paced, must faster than Street Fighter. If you’re only used to Street Fighter you’ll be in for a shock. This is definitely more in line with Tatsunoko vs Capcom where I’d put this as it’s ‘big brother’ playing about the same but with more characters, it’s unique techniques are more complicated though with that said not all the stuff that was in Tatsunoko transferred over here. If you want some quick fun easy to play fast paced action it’s here but you can also learn some finesse in the Mission mode. The mission mode is the equivalent to the challenge mode in Street Fighter IV where the game tells you combos to try and pull off in a training scenario that become more and more advanced as you finish them. This is a great way to learn some the more advanced techniques in the game and up your game so you’re at a tournament capable level of play instead of just playing casually. Challenge mode is definitely something you’ll spend hours playing if you’re serious about becoming good at this game.

You’ve got your obligatory arcade mode, but there isn’t much to see here. The mode is only a few fights before you’re facing off against the final boss of Galactus. Galactus can be kind of hard at first but once you figure out how to beat him he becomes a breeze to blaze through. The story is basically non-existent, you get a little comic of the character who defeated Galactus but it’s pretty bad and it’s not worth your time going through the game over and over again to see them all because they’re short and badly written. I wish you could play versus a computer team of your choice but sadly that choice isn’t given except within training mode that takes a little longer to setup than I’d like.

The graphics are amazing and give the game the right tone for a comic inspired fighting game. The characters have this cell-shaded look that appears really sharp and detailed. The animations are fine though you don’t pay them much notice bcause they happen so fast due to the pacing of the action. The hyper combos are well done and are look cool enough that I’m not sick of seeing them after even thousandth time I’ve done them. Backgrounds have tons of things going on in them and picking different stages whilst it doesn’t change the gameplay it is fun to see, my personal favorite being outside of the Daily Bugle with a parade having a Spider-Man float going on. The background music is great, catchy and stuff I could listen to over and over again. Fortunately this time around unlike the second game there aren’t any character sound effects that bug me terribly, though if you find one that you don’t like you’ve got the choice of the English or Japanese voice-overs for the characters. All in all the game’s presentation is top notch.

Unfortunately the game suffers from one stumble and that’s the online multiplayer mode. First of all there’s a lack of a tournament mode, something that was a great addition in Street Fighter IV and something that’s greatly missed here. You’ve just got Ranked and Unranked matches, and the option for an 8-man lobby. The 8-man lobby would be great if you could actually watch the matches but instead you can just watch the health drain as you wait for your turn, which takes away from ‘playing with a bunch of friends’ feel that the mode was going for. Then there’s the fact online multiplayer has serious issues in itself. Nine out of ten times that I try and find a ranked or unranked opponent the game will give an error and I’ll have to try again. This sort of thing is unacceptable and still hasn’t been fixed up to two weeks since release. I’m sure Capcom is hard at working trying to fix it but if you’re spending $60 of your money on a game you expect it not the have a gigantic issue like this out of the box. The local multiplayer works fine though, I’ve heard of some gameplay glitches but I can’t speak of any from personal experience.

Overall I had a great time with Marvel vs Capcom 3 but not without one big caveat. It irks me that such a great game would have such a big flaw straight from the box like the online multiplayer issues. The game is still a solid recommendation for the stuff it does right, but you might be waiting a little while for the online issues to get sorted out. Otherwise I can’t think of any reason to not pic the game up if you love fighting games, especially the frantic experience that only Marvel vs Capcom can deliver.

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