Street Fighter X Tekken

Being I've not had my hands on the game for long I'll be mainly giving my first impressions of the game. I am also no expert on the more subtle elements of fighting games but I'll give it a go. Street Fighter X Tekken does surprisingly well with the character roster in this game. The complaints about the on disc DLC are well founded on principle but there still is a massive cast of characters regardless. This, however does not excuse Capcom as the game takes a clear stance that it's being built from the ground up to extend the game by releasing Characters, Costume Packs, Costume Colours (possibly) and Gems.

Back to the characters though. Most of who I've used play really well and the Tekken characters make the transition as well as I'd hoped. While the Street Fighter characters play mostly the same on a basic level as their SFIV counterparts, they do have some minor changes for the most part. As always the Street Fighter characters focus mainly on special moves where Tekken puts their focus in Unique Attacks which serve as their trademark “Combo” moves. Hitting LP,LK,MP,LP and MK as Jin for example will execute a string of pre-made moves that link together. Whereas the Street Fighter characters would literally attack using the standard same strength moves in that order. I probably explained that poorly but in short the Tekken characters are quite easy to get a high combo from with little practice but there is no doubt a learning curve for Tekken players moving to the SFXT engine.

The game really rewards tagging out often in the game as it opens up many juggle chances and keeps your partners damage minimized as the first KO ends the round. I'm personally in half a mind about the Gem system. While it seems very interesting for personalized play it does add a pay to win aspect to the game. Also it means being familiar with a character is even harder because having power gems for example will make a character more powerful than he is. It would be nice if online play could turn the gems off but at this point I have not found such an option.

The online plays well as so far I've had little to no lag, even on the PS3 but one major problem is that pretty much all the sounds cut out when playing online. This is terribly annoying as it can do as much as throw off your rhythm when trying to string a large combo together. They should fix it soon but there is no way they didn't notice before launch. Game patches have ended up being a massive crutch for developers and now look where we are. Arcade mode is the usual deal. Nothing really worth mentioning. It's short but fun. You pretty much have the same modes as you've seen in SFIV already. Trials can absorb a decent amount of your time but otherwise you'll be waiting to play online or locally with friends. This is one of the reasons why the incomplete online is such a blow but in due time I'm sure it'll be fine.

On one last note. The framerate is great throughout. I never noticed a single dropped frame to my eyes and you get vsync, so no nasty cuts in the screen while it pans. The art style is great, just like SFIV was and the cartoon like look is pulled off well for the tekken characters. A few people like Law looks strange but it's overall a good job. It may be too early to tell if SFXT will be ruined by DLC in the future or that it'll be written off as a poor feeling game like MVC3 (though I feel like this game has plenty of substance compared to MVC3) but I personally think it's pretty good so far. Maybe not a replacement for 3^rd Strike or even SFIV maybe but time will tell.