Marvel vs. Capcom 2: New Age of Heroes Review

Nothing plays like it. Three fighters per side, assists on demand, air combos that carry a character to the top of the screen and back, and a level of visual noise that should be unreadable and somehow is not once you learn to track the important shape. The assist system is the real innovation, turning team selection into a design exercise where a character exists to make another character's approach safe. It rewards obsession and gives back enormously.

The presentation is a mess in a way that has aged into charm: sprites pulled from half a dozen unrelated games at mismatched resolutions, flat 3D backgrounds, and a lounge soundtrack that has no business being as memorable as it is. There is no story whatsoever, not even arcade endings worth the name. Competitively the roster is a fiction, since a handful of characters dominate so completely that most of those fifty six exist as decoration. It is unbalanced, ugly in patches and impossible to put down.