History with the Franchise:
I'm pretty sure I've played other MvC games before, but I don't really have any specific memories of the franchise. I generally always like playing fighting games. :)
What Happened:
We finally caved to the peer pressure of seeing everyone else play this game at the PAX East Console Freeplay and checked this one out as our 3rd game. We played for a good 30-40min. Generally I always only play as girls (I know, big surprise), but this time I purposefully tried to play as many characters as possible.
What I Liked:
Roster. I guess we didn't have all of the characters unlocked (I think?), but even in the amount of characters we could choose from there was an awesome variety. Not so much in terms of numbers, but more in terms of types of characters. Amaretsu plays very differently from say, She-Hulk.
Scale. I was really surprised at how they made it fun to play really big characters against really small ones. It was incredibly impressive. I may return to play this game to try to get a better sense of how they accomplished this.
Art Style. For the most part, graphically this game was really attractive! The effects were cool, the models looked nice. It's well done. I also generally liked the backgrounds - they were fun and interesting (although there is more on this below).
What I Didn't Like:
Intro animations. This is sort of a good thing and a bad thing! There are lots of small issues with the intro animations - character animations cause them to clip through each other, the variance in character sizes makes it so different characters heads are out of frame in the opening camera shot. I think it's a good thing because I don't think it's particularly noticeable! This seems like the sort of thing we would spend time and effort to address in any of our games, but in this top quality, hit game, it doesn't matter. :)
As mentioned above, the backgrounds were quite cool. They had character, were vibrant and alive - but also sometimes this was really distracting. In particular, when you're on the SHIELD Hellicarrier there are crazy anti-aircraft gun effects which make the overall visuals even more manic and confusing.
Confusing. I tried to make a point with the images I selected for this post - the effects in this game are out of control. Sometimes it's easy to feel lost in the action. I think if it was just visually confusing it might not be so bad, but I felt that the controls were also confusing. I've never been very good at fighting games personally, so it may just have been me - but it felt like half of the time, Issam or I were saying "I have no idea what just happened."
Character swapping. Switching characters took while for us to figure out - if you tap the shoulder buttons one of your 2 helper characters would come to your aid briefly - but if you held it, you would switch with them. That's sort of a confusing mechanic to figure out on your own. :)
Aliasing?! Again, what's with Japanese games and aliasing? Everything's all jaggy all the time. This was particularly noticeable during the loading screen when you had a moment to stare at black silhouettes of your characters against a colorful background.
Holes in models. Also during the loading screen, on certain characters you could flat out see holes in the models. Again, this was something that would generate loads of bugs, but I think it's something that doesn't matter. It kind of shows that it's not very important in the grand scheme of things.
Phoenix. I'm pretty sure Phoenix's balance was off. Every time either of us played her we took damage way faster than any other character. It was weird.
How Do I Feel About Continuing?:
Fighting games are definitely a fun way to pass the time, and I'm sure I will play this game again.
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