Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite

I can't say I've ever been much of a Marvel vs. Capcom person. The series' particular brand of insanity never much appealed to me, and whenever I would play it would be between friends who, like me, never had a great understanding of what they were doing. Then an opportunity to get a copy of the newest game in the series early arose, and I figured I'd give the series another go, especially with my recent resurgence of interest in fighting games.

The pre-release speculation of this game outside of the hardcore MvC audience has been astoundingly negative from what I have seen. The initial reveal sported bland, muddy character models that, despite about ten years of separation, arguably looked worse than the super stylized MvC3 models. Capcom promised updated models on launch, and they seemed to deliver, albeit not to any great effect. The models all still look stale. In fact, the whole presentation of the game looks stale. Looking back on Marvel 3, and say what you will about the game itself, but that game had a look. That look may have been slightly painful to look at at times, but it had some god damn style to it, something this game seems to completely lack. That being said, the stages all look fantastic. Detailed, crazy environments that you will arguably never look at. The hypers are still the screen filling, retina burning madness they've always been--and they've never looked better. If the models and UI of the game just had a little bit more style to them, this game would look so much better.

The story mode has been touted by Capcom as being one of the focuses of MvC:I, and well... they certainly made it... cinematic? The story itself is absolute trash. They don't even give you an exposition until two thirds of the way through it, and the interactions between the Marvel and Capcom universe characters--which should be one of the focuses of a zany thing like these two universes colliding--kind of...doesn't exist in any significant way. The game takes place 90 something days after the universes collided, and doesn't even touch on those first few days of figuring out what the fuck just happened--which should have been the fun part. Instead we get what amounts to a boring super hero movie with Capcom characters thrown in, and some horrid, horrid voice over. Play the story mode if you want to laugh at some poor storytelling and some poor voice acting.

Something I must say was extremely disappointing was the structure of the mission mode. I generally jump into the missions/challenges right away in order to get a feel for some of the cast and find out which characters I enjoy playing, and the mission mode in this game is terrible. They go over some of the special moves for each character (some, not all), a basic air combo (that is essentially universal), a basic tag combo, and a basic hyper combo. After that they go into two or three more advanced combos. 10 missions in total per character. My biggest gripe is that you can't easily reset positions, which is incredibly annoying if you are working with a combo that say, only works from mid screen. The easiest way to do it is to view and skip the demonstration. Not ideal. Additionally, you can either view the name of the move or the command for said move, and the default is the name. That means if you want to know what the fuck you're actually supposed to do, you have to go into the menu and reset those options every time you start mission mode up again. It is incredibly frustrating especially opposed to something like Guilty Gear Xrd which has an amazing mission mode. Ultimately it's not a big deal for most people, but it's still a complete drag that it's so abysmal.

But, the fighting is good. You can come up with your own combos intuitively if you have some time to burn in training mode. The roster is severely lacking, but is going to be padded out through DLC. Say what you will about that. The netcode is certainly better than SFV, a low bar to be sure, but actually the netcode seems very well done. I've never really had a laggy or jittery match. It was by no means perfect (no netcode is) but it certainly got the job done.

All in all, MvC:I is a good fighting game marred by garbage content. If you enjoyed the past Marvel games then you'll certainly enjoy this one, but if you think twice about spending $60 on a game then definitely don't spend the money on this one. The fact that you need to spend another thirty to get the rest of the game through their first set of DLC is a bunch of nonsense, especially considering some of those characters are already in the game's story mode. Whatever, Capcom will be Capcom.