Marvel vs. Capcom 3: Full Access Video

To say we were excited to get our hands on MvC3 was an understatement, it’s already the biggest fighting game of 2011, and Capcom's been building the hype up to a fever pitch. Even better, this build features all the announced characters up to Storm and C. Viper. It's a pretty raw build though, sounfortunately there's no cool story mode or anything to show off, just raw beatdown action.After mashing buttons as hard as we could here's our preliminary take on Fate of Two Worlds.

This episode: Brett, Chris and Grimm go toe to toe in a knock-down, drag-out epic not seen since Ali went 10 rounds with Chun-li back in 1971. Brett and Chris say funny things, Grimm drones on about zoning and linking assist attacks into combos.

Usually we just let the video do the talking, but here's a few additional first impressions of MvC3 for your enjoyment:

The first thing we noticed about MvC3 is the number of powerful projectile attacks. MvC2 was chock full of projectiles and ranged attacks, but the game’s core was built around aerial combos and rush down tactics. Because MvC3 moves significantly slower than MvC2, it can actually be hard to get over some of the projectile spam, especially if your character of choice lacks an air dash. Zoning opponents with projectiles in MvC2 wasn’t a viable strategy, but here it seems like it may be more effective.

Above: Pringles, Pringles everywhere

Characters vary pretty wildly in their strategies, Storm, Wolverine and Magento seem to play identically to their MvC2 counterparts, though they’re definitely hampered by their relatively reduced speed. MODOK is suitably bizarre; his rocket chair allows him to hover like Sentinel from MvC2 and his attacks are an assortment of random crap shooting out of his chair and forehead.MODOK's Analyze Cube projectile attack powers him up every time it hits, similar to Dormammu's abillity to power up his attacks by chargingup red and blueenergy, or Arthur's level 1 Super armor attack.

Thor, Hulkand She-Hulk fall more into the bruiser category, and like the bruisers in MvC2, we’re worried their lack of speed and large size will be too much of a handicap for them to overcome despite their big damage output. At this point we've gotta give it to Super Skrull and Zero as the two best starter characters, they're fast, dogood damage and have easy to execute combos that link into their Super attacks easily. We were also surprised by Trish's abillity to do big damage with relatively simple combos and Super attacks. We actually chatted with Capcom's own fighting game guru Seth Killian and analyzed someof theother characters, which you can check out right here.

Above: If MvC3 is anything like MvC2 get prepared to see this move a lot

It can’t be understated just how great MvC3 looks in motion, the bright, colorful character models fill the screen with lasers, bombs, fireballs and more and it’s all animated beautifully. The slavish attention to detail will please fans of both Marvel and Capcom: the alternate color costumes for the Marvel characters are (mostly) canon variants, and the Capcom characters’ attacks are all loyal to their respective games: Arthur still moves with the same exaggerated motions he had back in Super Ghosts n’ Goblins, and Amaterasu’s beautiful watercolor styled animations are intact.

MvC3 shows every sign that it'll live up to it's predecessor's legacy, and we can't wait to see the game in a more finished state with story mode and online play ready to go. While some MvC2 diehards may be salty about the changes, MvC3 looks like it'll bemore than awesome enough for most gamers.

MvC3 arrives February 15th in North America and February 18th in Europe

Jan 6th, 2010