Real Talk by J. Valdez

One of the best fighting games of all time is now available on the iPhone. However I don’t really feel like I’m playing one of the best fighting games of all time. The game plays slow, and it doesn’t help that the controls seem to follow my commands reluctantly. I’ve had games lag, or some games can have unresponsive controls at times, but with MvsC2, it doesn’t matter if you have apps open or not, or if you are jail-broken or not. The lag is actually consistent in that aspect.

The controls are actually simpler than some of the other fighting games I’ve played on the iPhone. At least the default ones are, you can add more buttons and move them around to better suit your style. I don’t like the special and assist buttons though. On other games the special/assist can work for different moves depending how you move the joystick. In this game however, you tap and slide in a certain direction to get a desired special attack/assist move. It may not seem like a big deal but if this were the fast paced game it was supposed to be, then the lag from input would leave you defenseless for a second or two.

One thing that fighting games kind of lack on the iOS is the ability to play against the CPU in a just for fun match. Sure you can play arcade against the CPU, but sometimes I just want to play one fight, and I don’t want to get on wifi to play someone else. There is no option for that in this game. It has a couple of game modes but all with a purpose, if you will. I’d like to take some of the characters and just fight one match without having to fight another immediately after. As for game modes, on MvsC2 you have Arcade, VS, training, and score attack. Those are pretty self-explanatory.

The visuals are not bad at all while playing. It looks like the original game with a bit of modification to fit the screen. Some people may complain that its not HD. However the game still looks very good, it would look nice with the HD treatment but its not needed at all. It’s also very satisfying to watch the animations when you are able to defeat the lag and do a combo/hypercombo. Which is one of the main things I liked about the original game.

I found it hard to advance from fight to fight, not because I didn’t know how to use the characters, but because of the lag from input I keep talking about. Most of the time, by the time you were able to input for a combo/hypercombo, the enemy was already attacking you, or blocking. Sometimes this is to be expected because obviously the enemy isn’t supposed to stand there and take your hits. It starts getting annoying however, when you try to dodge an attack, but aren’t able to dodge in time, then when you dodge, you get hit with another attack. It doesn’t work for me in other games, but this was the first game where I was able to spam attacks back and win (thank you Iceman).

All in all it’s not the game I remember playing. Not the fast pace, excitement filled fighter that I would play with friends or family. This is a slower sibling version of that game. You may argue that it’s only slow because its running on a phone. Wouldn’t even bother arguing back because I’ve played many, many games that were bigger, faster, and more graphic intensive that MvsC2, so I know it’s not the phone. If anything it could be that they didn’t optimize the game for the phone, and the code ran slower when ported over. For 4.99, a price that actually surprised me due to it being the full game (I thought it would’ve been more), the biggest thing about MvsC2 was speed, and that isn’t present in this port.

Marvel vs Capcom 2 Gets

Out of five

What’s Legit??

+It’s Marvel vs Capcom 2 man!

+It’s cheap for being the full game

What’s Perpetrating??

–It lags

–It’s slow to react

-It’s laggy and slow