Rev12-3-10#8

Posted by Jacob H. on 4th Dec 2010

MvC2 is one of the best fighting games with huge roster to boot.It's been played for 10 years even though it's little brother MvC3 is just about to be born.

By performing air combos to newly added snapbacks, this game has basically everything a fighting game should have. Tagging in your partner can be done at anytime during the match, just as long as you aren't stuck in a trap or an air combo.

The greatest thing about this game are it's various assists. Assists are basically attacks that your inactive characters come in and use. There are many different types of assists. You got your expansions, projectiles, ground moves, captures, anti-airs, and a few more. Each character has three different assists, and you choose them when you start your game. They can't be switched during a match or in between matches in arcade play, but that's the fun part.

Like Street Fighter, you have a meter, and with each move you do (it doesn't have to connect), the bar increases by a portion. Now, if you get his with an opposing attack, the bar increases faster than what it would if you hit an opponent with your attack. For each meter you have, you'll be able to perform a hyper combo. These are usually done with a quarter-circle double punch or double kick setting, but you can also hit the two assist buttons as well.

The max meter level is 5. A regular hyper takes up one bar of the meter, a double hyper takes up two while a triple hyper takes up a three. You execute doubles and triple when you have more than one bar active on your meter and by pressing the two assist buttons at the same time. This is more damaging than a single hyper and also looks a lot cooler.

You win the match when you KO all three of your opponent's fighters or when time runs out and you have the highest life combined out of all of your characters.

There are a total of 56 characters in the game! These characters include people from X-Men, Street Fighter, Darkstalkers, and I think a few more. This is where the real fun comes into play. You can choose a custom team of 3 consisting of any of these 56 characters. Most characters are unlocked, and you get to obtain them by gaining points by playing the game itself. If you take 56 x 3, that's 168, meaning 168 different assists in the whole game and over a ten-thousand different assist combination as well!

When a beginner first plays MvC2, they'll think that the game is pretty much dominated by projectiles. They'll think that every Street Fighter character is pointless because they have no beam projectiles. While this is true for the incredible stupid AI, it's not true for other players. The real challenge of this game is the other players that play this game. Arcade mode is just to train yourself up to a veteran level. Once you reach a veteran level of play, you'll notice that every character is quite playable, but there are the very little that seem rather impossible to beat somebody with.

The downsides of the gameplay would be the very few slowdowns you get in a few stages and the fact that you have to unlock the characters by playing through the game. Some of your favorite characters may be locked, so you may have to work your way up by playing your not-so-favorite characters. No matter what, you'll unlock them, and if you don't feel like playing arcade mode, just leave the game on overnight in Training Mode to come back the next morning and see that you have over 7000 points to spend.

If you're used to the arcade play, you can fully customize your play on the PS2 controller. Since the PS2 controller has an extra set of buttons, you can customize instant tag ins to those buttons. You can have the four main buttons as your main attacks, the right shoulder buttons for assists, and the left shoulder buttons for the quick tags ins! The gameplay of MvC2 is so incredibly high.