Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite is the newest installment of the long running series that started in 1996 with X-Men vs. Street Fighter. Technically this is the sixth installment to the series. The setup for this game is that Ultron and Sigma have joined forces in order to wipe out organic life in both their respective universes. They merge into one and form Ultron Sigma, which one of the laziest names I’ve never heard of. The design, however, of their amalgamation is quite nice in my opinion.
Let’s address the couple of large elephants in the room before getting into the nitty gritty of the game. First off, the internet didn’t seem too pleased with the visual route Capcom chose to took with this game. The models look somewhat similar to MvsC3, but with far less cell shading. Capcom went as far to respond to community complaints by changing Chun-Li’s face. Personally, I don’t have an issues with the graphics and it’s left up to your personal preferences.
The other issue are the complete lack of X-Men related characters in this game. I feel this is more an issue related to licensing and Capcom shouldn’t be at fault for this. The lack of fan favs, like Doom and Wolverine, are sorely missed for sure though. The current number of fighters out of the gate is 30. This is somewhat small already in comparison to Ultimate Marvel vs. Capcom 3 with 50 fighters. DLC is, of course, planned for the near future and will include characters such as Sigma, Monster Hunter, Black Panther, Winter Soldier, Black Widow, and Venom. Supposedly they’re all coming this year, but I can’t say for sure 100%. Monster Hunter will be the first to be release, but has no solid release date as of writing this article.
A variety of stages are included, and generally represent a merging of the two universes. For example, Valkanda is a mix of Black Panther’s home country Wakanda and that of the Monster Hunter universe. Another funny addition is “A.I.M Brella”, where M.O.D.O.K. hangs out in the background. The biggest drawback is most of the stages are comprised of three of these mixtures, such as the A.I.M.Brella stages and Xgard stages (a cybernetic version of Asgard). Some more variety would have been welcome here.
The game took a while to download, so I started my experience by going through the missions for each character. I completed more than 60% of the missions. Each mission is tailored towards familiarizing yourself with each individual character. Early on I learned that each character plays very different from one another. For example, Dante focuses on chaining different moves together in order to achieve a variety of desired outcomes. This means using a majority of Dante’s arsenal found in Devil May Cry. Thankfully, there don’t seem to be a ton of Ryu clones in this game.
One large change for this game are the inclusion of Infinity Stones. In addition to traditional support attacks, you can now choose one of six stones to include “surge” attacks. Surge attacks, taking damage, and doling out damage build your infinity bar which allows you to eventually pull off an “infinity storm”. These seem to be quite devastating if used correctly. For example, the space stone can trap your opponent in a cage. This not only restricts movement, but they also cannot switch characters while trapped. This could lead to all sorts of interesting combinations for very high level players.
Also somewhat different from past games, is that you can only choose 2 characters to join the fray with you. Admittedly, having three fighters for a six on six battle was interesting, but it could get quite hectic at times. With the inclusion of the stones, I think Capcom made the right choice on this. Having 3 characters, plus the stones, would be a lot to balance on their side of things.
I found a lot of these missions to be fairly simple until about mission 8 or so for each character. At this point combo strings become incredibly long and sometimes hard to read on screen. I ended up finding myself paying attention to the required moves for said combos instead of focusing on the characters themselves. I’m not sure that method will work for everyone, but you might find it useful. The previous games were very combo focused, and after playing against a few higher level players than myself online, there’s not a whole lot of button mashing going on. Before, I feel as though beginners could pick it up and mash in some things and still make some headway. With this installment, it feels as though you have to be much more calculated and reactive to things compared to other games in the series. That being said, I myself am not a high level fighting game player. I love fighting games, but I’ve never really been pro at them.
(note: this screengrab was taken early in my playthrough)
I played roughly 100 matches online. While my internet is quite good here in Tokyo, it did take 5+ minutes to find a match usually. This was after widening my search range beyond Japan. Connections seemed to be a mixed bag of smooth and laggy. It was basically really good or really bad from my experience and shouldn’t be the preferred way to play if at all possible. That aside, the options included for the online suite are quite nice. You have ranked and casual, which is pretty standard. They’ve also gone and included a beginner’s league to help scrubs such as myself. The inclusion of lobby’s is always nice of course too. As with most of Capcom’s fighting games there are a plethora of things to unlock and customize your fighter card. For example, as of now, there are 218 titles to unlock. There are also various items to collect from movies, artwork, sounds, voices, and charater bios w/ a model viewer.
Lastly, let’s talk about story mode real quick. I’m not going to spoil the story for anyone, but I’ll just say it falls flat a bit. It has you doing a couple of interesting things, such as fighting 5-6 robots in one fight. One fight has you as Ryu and Hulk fending off an attack from Ultron Sigma’s robots, and the game you’re defending has it’s own life bar. Where the story lacks is the character interaction. Sometimes it’s really interesting to see how the characters deal with each other, but a majority of the time the voice acting and dialogue from some characters (looking at you Rocket) are kinda cringey. You can definitely tell Capcom tried to put some effort into it though. The mode takes a couple of hours to get through as well. I’ve heard many people didn’t like the final boss battle and though he looked silly, but I enjoyed it.
All in all Marvel vs. Capcom Infinite is a solid title, and I do recommend it for fans of the series. Due to the focus on high level play, I might suggest steering away if you’re a complete beginner to the series. It would have also been nice to hear “I Wanna Take You For A Ride” one more time….
