For a brief 30-minute window at this year's Evo, I was able to sample a small amount of Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls on PS5, the new Marvel fighting game from Arc System Works—and I was immediately hooked.
I wasn't alone, as evidenced by the long queues of people at Evo each day, trying to play a small part of the game alone or with their friends. There is hype building about this game, and PlayStation is making the most of it by teasing small parts of a larger experience.
It's hard to put into words just how good this game already looks and feels, a point the Sony PR rep next to me kept emphasizing during my play session. This build is a very early look at the game, and a lot can change. But that didn't stop me from sampling as much of it as I could.
First things first, Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls is a 4 vs. 4 tag fighting game, but despite picking four characters, you begin a match with just two and need to unlock the other characters through specific actions, or inactions. You can unlock characters by throwing or mashing an opponent to another area at the edge of the screen, or you get one when you lose a round.
Just because you have four characters doesn't mean you have to use them all, though, as the devs told us that one strategy is to learn a singular fighter and then use the others purely to support you and not bring them into the fight at all. Fighters share the same health bar, and unlocking additional Fighters gives you more health and more damage, even if by a fraction. Unlocking additional characters mid-fight also gives you more metres to use super moves or actions.
As for gameplay, the game features a very simplistic approach, allowing fighters to reuse the same button combos to create chains of moves, activate supers, or trigger support actions. It really does stem back to the idea of a fighting game being easy to learn but hard to master.
You have a low, medium, and high button, which fighting game veterans should be used to, but there's also an Assemble button that is purely used for switching in characters or mixing up moves. Depending on the placement of your support character, if you do a left assemble, it brings in the character to the left, and down assemble brings in the lower character, and then you can press the assemble button again to switch to that character and continue a chain of combos to mix up your game.
It's hard not to comment on the game also looking pretty stunning, even with the current build and the six playable characters that we were able to experience during the preview, with each having their own defining properties. Fights are pretty flashy with a lot of action, especially when you make the most of the switching system and the resulting combos.
Honestly, I came out of my experience wanting to learn more and see more than the six characters we could play, because the game already feels like it has a lot of depth. I'm excited to see what both casual and professional players can do with this game when it launches in the future. I'm pretty hyped, and I hope everyone gets to experience the game soon so they can understand the hype I feel.
The post Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls hands-on was simply marvelous appeared first on Destructoid.
