Marvel Vs Capcom: Infinite
One of the most impenetrable fighting games around shows its friendly side
PC, PS4, Xbox One
Well, we needn’t have worried about complexity. When Marvel Vs
Capcom: Infinite was announced, we’ll admit to being concerned at what the change to a two-on-two structure would do to one of the most varied and flexible fighting games on the market. In Marvel Vs Capcom 3, you chose three characters, then an assist – a special move that could be performed by an off-screen teammate – for each of them, from a choice of three. In a game with a huge roster, there were millions of potential team combos. Yet in Infinite, motivated by a desire to make a spectacular, but often impenetrable, game more accessible, Capcom has reduced team sizes, and done away with assists. By the end of our first sit down with the game, however, any lingering worries have not so much faded away as been Hyper Comboed into deep space.
When Infinite was announced at last year’s PlayStation Experience, Capcom made much hay of the Infinity Stones, a handy mechanical MacGuffin borrowed from Marvel lore. You choose your two warriors, and then a stone, which gives each team member an extra move to use in open play, and an Infinity Storm – a powerful, time-limited status buff – when a meter is filled. The Capcom line is that this mechanic does the job of a third character, and while that might be stretching things a bit, the Stones certainly offer something that wasn’t available in previous games in the series. Three are available in the build we play, and while we’ve little chance of understanding their true utility in the space of a couple of hours, the possibilities are already intriguing. An early favourite is the Space Stone, which when fully powered up traps the opponent in a rectangular box for a spell, limiting their moveset as well as their movement. The Stones are vital, certainly: they give
Infinite its comeback mechanic, while also adding an extra layer of flexibility to Capcom’s pared-back approach to team building. But the character-switch system – now named Shifting – appears, on first inspection, to be the true heart of the game.
Previous Marvel Vs Capcom games were quite restrictive in the ways you could tag team members in to and out of the fray. But here you can Shift at almost any time, and the possibilities are dizzying. You can jump, tricking your opponent into blocking high, then tag in a partner and hit them with a low attack. You can fling out a projectile with one character, then Shift, letting you advance close behind, effectively cancelling the fireball’s recovery animation. And once you land a few hits, and start tagging in and out, chaining specials, Hyper Combos and Infinity Stone moves, you’ll wonder how you ever thought Capcom was going to make a Marvel game
that wasn’t impossibly deep, incredibly complex, and ridiculously spectacular.
If all that puts you off, however, rest assured that at a low level, this is the most accessible fighting game Capcom has made in years. Attacks are mapped to the face buttons, and simply hammering the light punch button performs an auto combo that includes a flashy aerial string. One of your character’s Hyper Combos can be performed by simply pressing the two heavy attack buttons at the same time, while Shifting and Infinity Stone moves are mapped to the shoulders. The result is a game that lets you decide how much you want to engage with the more complex systems: we quickly found that by manually performing a basic ground combo we could save the automatic string until we had an opponent up in the air, extending its duration and raising its damage output. Experimental taps of the Shift button extend our strings further – these are far from optimal combos, certainly, but it does mean that even a novice player can quickly feel powerful, understanding how the basic systems work before putting in the hours in Training mode. This sort of gradual, organic approach to self-improvement might just be the answer for Capcom, a company that has traditionally struggled with tutorials in its fighting games. And given the strength of the licence, producer Michael Evans acknowledges, it’s more important than ever that Capcom caters for the less-skilled player.
“We want to get the game into the hands of as many players as possible,” he tells us. “There’ll be a lot of people coming in: maybe Marvel or Capcom fans who’ve never played the series, or fighting games. We just want to make sure they can jump in and have fun.”
Peter Rosas, the Capcom producer who got his job in part as a result of his skill on the Marvel Vs Capcom tournament scene, agrees despite his hardcore credentials. “We want to make sure this game is accessible and approachable, because it hasn’t been historically. It’s been entertaining, sure, but hard to get into. This game is a lot easier to approach, a lot easier to digest, and a lot easier to play.”
There’s a lot more to do in it, too, particularly in the context of Capcom’s recent form. It’s impossible not to view Infinite through the prism of Street Fighter V’s botched launch, and given the emphasis Capcom’s marketing materials have put on the variety of content that will absolutely, positively, be included on day one, it seems Infinite’s maker agrees. Arcade mode, still conspicuous by its absence from SFV more than a year after launch, will be there. Mission mode and eightplayer lobbies, with spectator functions for those waiting their turn, will too. Online play should be much improved, since Infinite will use platform-holder APIs for matchmaking, rather than SFV’s Capcom Fighters Network, which was built to support cross-platform play between PC and PS4, was recently rebuilt from the ground up, and is still considered a work in progress. Most importantly for a game with an eye on Marvel’s broad fanbase, a cinematic story mode, penned by Capcom with oversight from Marvel, will also be available on day one. Considered to sit outside the Marvel canon, this is a cross-pollination of Infinite’s two component universes – something that’s best exemplified by Ultron Sigma, the chief antagonist, a mix of The Avengers’ nemesis and a recurring villain in the Mega Man X games, that has been created not by Marvel, but Capcom. Evans admits getting a new character design past the Marvel overlords was no easy task (“Man,” he says to widespread laughter, “you have no idea”) but insists the process has been, if occasionally fraught, nothing but friendly throughout.
“It’s been awesome,” he says. “We all have opinions. But they know Capcom is an expert at fighting games; they want to allow us to do what we do best. They give us guidance, but we do have leeway. It’s not just a Marvel game: it’s a crossover game, a Capcom game as well. It’s been a great journey: we’ve gone through that trial by fire and come out the other end high fiving. We have high hopes for this one. We think it’s going to do very well.”
At a low level, this is the most accessible fighting game Capcom has made in years