Marvel vs Capcom 3

Solid, but barebones.

Marvel vs Capcom 3 is the latest and greatest name in a long line of fighting game series that have returned to the scene this generation. With all of the additions of online play, game modes and emphasis on competition you'd think Capcom would've prepared a much deeper online experience, especially when Super Street Fighter IV, a game they released last year in the same genre, had a much more expansive online service.

Sadly enough, that expansive online service did not carry over from Super Street Fighter IV. Instead gamers are treated to a barebones and barely functioning online service that has become the meat of multiplayer games today. Ranked matchmaking is almost broken at this point, with ranked matches taking forever to get into, and if you do get into a match, they are laggy to the point of being unplayable. Player matches are fine, since you can search for lobbies unlike in ranked, but you can't spectate other peoples' matches. Instead, non-fighters are treated to a menu where you can see the health bars of combatants slowly drain until a winner is declared. In fighting games, people either want to play or see other people play. While it can be understandable that a lot of that stuff would slow down the game, perhaps showing it on a delay of a couple of seconds would help soften the load in terms of connectivity.

The game also features a player license where you can look at stats, setup reserve teams, titles and icons. The most disappointing feature about this is your friends stats. You can look at them, but every time you start up your game the information isn't there, meaning you have to manually update each individual friend's information you play the game if you want to. In addition to this, the friends list doesn't sort depending on whether they've played the game or not. In conjunction with the online functionality of the game, this comes off as very cheap and unfinished at Capcom's expense. With the plethora of DLC announcements we've had so far, players are left to wonder if they're going to be asked to pay for the honor of a patch, or in the form of a 2012 update which I'll dub "Super Marvel vs Capcom 3."

With all the negativity about the online features behind us, the offline features are where the game has a lot of functionality behind it. You have Arcade Mode, which is 7 fights long, a Training Mode and a Mission Mode in addition to local versus play. In the Arcade and Training modes you can choose to have online fight requests on like in Super/Street Fighter IV. Training Mode can also act like facing bots in Arcade Mode, but you have complete choice over them. While some may say this is better than how it's done in Street Fighter, I have to question that since there's no real competition behind it. Training Mode is basically a sandbox where you can fool around with life and hyper bars, AI movesets assists. It's not for competition and hurts the game's replay value because of it.

The gameplay of Marvel vs Capcom 3 is very fun, and you can do a lot with the combos and chains. However, given the amount of problems the game has, and given Capcom's questionable record in the past about functionality updates to their games, you have to wonder if the game will have long legs or not. Because unless you're a serious fighting game fan, it's really not worth a full purchase price with the problems it has right now.