Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Fate of Two Worlds

Ultimate Marvel vs Capcom 3 is a re-release of Marvel vs Capcom 3 which keeps up the recent Capcom trend of annoying fans and adding extra content for newcomers like me. What you get with this game is a total of 48 Marvel and Capcom characters battling it out in teams of 3 at rapid speeds.

You can choose any team of 3 characters you desire, and switch between them on the fly during the match. As you fight, you build up your Hyper Combo gauge which can be filled up to 5 levels. Tapping the assist button calls them in for a single attack. You can trigger a Crossover Combination which calls in your allies to team together for a powerful, combined attack which costs a full meter.

A successful 'Snap Back' move forces your opponent to switch out to an opponent of your choice at the cost of a full meter. A Crossover Counter costs a full meter and is used after blocking and can turn defence into offence as your character switches.

The 4 basic attacks you have are on the face buttons of the controller and are light, medium, heavy attacks and Special; which basically launches your opponent into the air. As a general guide, a decent combo would be to hit the light, medium, heavy then special attacks. This then can be chained into an air combo. After the special button launches the opponent into the air, you then press Up to jump up with them, then continue to deal the damage. After getting a few extra hits, you can then press the special button to call your opponent in mid air which is known as the Team Air Combo, and this can be repeated to call in your final team member.

If you have played previous Capcom games, you will know a couple of moves for each character since the usual Ryu Hadouken move (down, right-down, right, attack) is used for all characters as is the Shoryuken (right, down, down-right, attack). I found the game fairly confusing at first, but once you read into the mechanics and can air combo properly and use Hyper Combos to deal the damage, then normal difficulty will be straight forward.

Arcade mode has 6 fights, then ends in a battle with Galactus from Fantastic 4. Galactus is huge and can dish out some insane damage, but most moves can be blocked by holding 'back' and other moves can be prevented by dishing out enough damage.

Heroes and Heralds mode has a series of battles to win territory and cards. The cards have a certain effect on the battles and you choose 3 in your deck. The amount of characters help provide a great amount of fun, value, and longevity. Hardcore fighters will no doubt spend lots of time experimenting with the possible permutations to see which characters work the best in their combos.

Mission mode gives you the challenge of performing 10 set combos with each character. The bad thing about this mode is only the name of the move appears on screen, and you have to go into the pause menu to see the actual button presses that are required.

The main criticism I have with the game is that it seems a bit too fast paced which seems to encourage button mashing. Sometimes to get the combo correct, you have an insanely small time window (we are talking tenths of a second) to input the next command. The great thing is that it is a fun game with an amazing character roster and wonderful graphics which will provide many hours of entertainment.

One last hurrah for Capcom's Vs. fighter series; you're still going to have more fun with Street Fighter 4 or the original Marvel games, unfortunately.

Arc System Works and NetherRealm Studios basically took over the duties of making fast-paced, high-combo fighters after MvC3 shifted itself out of popularity.

I remember wanting to play this game when I found out it had characters like Wesker and Nemesis from Resident Evil, and that's the best thing about this game. Tons of Capcom characters that will make any fanboy cream their pants, Dante, Amaterasu, Wesker, Jill Valentine, Ryu, and Arthur from Ghosts N' Goblins and of course the Marvel side has an equal amount of recognizable heroes that would give the Marvel fanboys a similar reaction, Spider-Man, Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, Deadpool, and Wolverine, it's like someone went to a fan convention and asked people to list off the greatest Marvel superheroes. Either way, that's as far as my praise can go, as a fighting game this isn't bad, its just hard as shit and relies on complex combos. I mean okay Street Fighters, Tekken, and BlazBlue require skill to play too, and if you played against the top players you'd get your ass kicked in seconds in any of those games, but MvC 3 I just feel like the learning curve is far too great, and the payoff isn't good enough. I mean if you can master it you basically just spam combos and your opponent can't even do anything while you're doing these impressive combos. The story mode isn't too great, its about basic and what you'd expect, and you fight the same boring final boss every time. Yeah its cool we get all the awesome characters in this and its a game I want to like so bad, but I just don't think it's as good as the better Street Fighter or Tekken games, hell I wouldn't even say its as good as Soul Calibur either.

Ultimate brought the goods just fine, but man was launch MVC3 a bummer. Weird roster with so many off-kilter villain inclusions and not enough raw novelty characters, and basically nothing in the way of extras, damning in the same release window as Mortal Kombat 9. Even the fighting is slightly disappointing with a level of homogeny to the aerial combos that frame the entire game, but it's still a pretty good fighting game with some of the best presentation you will ever find in a 3D fighter.