After all these years I have now gone ahead and bought the latest Marvel vs Capcom title. I feel like it never quite had the lasting power of MVC2 or 3 but it’s still a great fighting game with a bunch of characters. I also do appreciate that it has a full legitimate story beyond just intros and endings in arcade mode. So that gives it some points and at the end of the day it’s the kind of game that you can play with friends for hours.

The story starts off midway through. Marvel and Capcom’s universes have merged and it’s been 3 months since then. The heroes are trying to fight off Ultra Sigma from taking over all of the worlds and they are down to their last lines of defense. In order to win they are going to need all of the Infinity Stones. Obtaining them will not be easy though and they might even have to turn to a dangerous villain for aid.

It’s a fairly basic story but it gets the job done. My only real problem with it is that it starts 3 months later so everyone’s already friends so we missed all of the meetups. I feel like that takes a lot of the punch out of a crossover like this. It’s an okay story but I feel like just about anyone could easily write a more interesting one. It just plays things too safe and there is also no power level consistency here. You will see Chris Redfield overpowering Ultron droids and throwing them around yet I’m supposed to believe that Mega Man X and Hulk were losing ground against these guys? Nahhhhhhhhhhhh, but if you ignore all of the power levels and such at least you get to see your favorite characters winning and everything.

The gameplay is a classic 2 on 2 style. Gone are the days of 3 vs 3 but the gameplay is fairly polished. You also have the Infinity Stones in play which give extra powers and abilities. For the most part I’d say they’re kinda pointless but I guess they wanted to tie them in somehow. You have your auto combos in the game as well as a lot of more advanced ones that you would have to do by hand. Those would definitely be more effective but they take longer to master so that’s a very fair ratio.

While the artstyle isn’t the best, the graphics are still really solid. It’s great seeing the updated character models for everyone and the backgrounds as good. I also liked one cutscene in particular where we actually saw all of the characters fighting it out with Ultron. I think they spent most of the budget on that one but it was definitely cool. The soundtrack is a little more on the generic side. I didn’t notice any tunes that really caught my eye but I suppose that I definitely didn’t get to play on every stage.

In terms of replay value there is naturally a ton here. Aside from completing the story you can do arcade mode, play endless vs battles and of course aim for the Platinum. The trophies look like they would be rather difficult to obtain so that would last you a long while. Also in general it just goes without saying that fighting games are endless for replay value so long as the gameplay itself is good. Fortunately that very much is the case so there are really no issues there.

The story mode itself is shockingly easy for just about the whole game until the final boss. Suddenly the difficulty cranks up to 11. It’s a bit jarring at first because you get used to playing in a very sloppy fashion. Endless auto combos and everything but then suddenly you have to actually fight for real. It makes things interesting though so I appreciate that. It actually took me like 4-5 tries to take the guy down because he kept knocking me out before I could get the health all the way down. Even my very last attempt came down to the wire. So definitely don’t underestimate that boss.

In general it shows how rusty I am with this gameplay style though. There was once a time where I would have effortlessly solo’d the boss and now look at me? Barely scraping by when it counts. That was definitely an eye opener and ironically I do better against actual players since they won’t block my random supers the way that an A.I. does. I think they should code in the ability for a computer to fall for a random strategy every once in a while don’t you think?

There’s not a whole lot more to say about this one since it is fairly basic. I guess as a mild negative in a sense, I just think they could have done a bit more for this one. It almost feels in some ways like a smaller budget MVC title than you would expect from something on a PS4 console. Whether it’s making a longer story mode or inflating the character count a bit, you can tell that it doesn’t have quite the same level of effort as something like Super Smash Bros. Few things do of course but I felt like this game in particular really stood out. Like it could have been amazing if it tried just a little harder instead of being great.

Overall, Marvel vs Capcom Infinite is a great game. At the end of the day it’s a nice, fast paced 2D fighter with a good character roster. It’s not as ambitious as it could have been and might end up falling short compared to some of its competition in the modern fighting game arena but you’re bound to have a lot of fun here. Having a full story mode should be the norm nowadays so I hope they keep that up. If you have time for a good fighting game to dive into, then I definitely recommend jumping into this one.

Overall 8/10