If you’ve been slogging through the aerial jugglefest that is Marvel Vs Capcom 3, and can make heads or tales out of what’s happening amidst quirky character crows, blinding epilepsy-inducing lights and flashes and, what each of your back-up cast are doing among all this, then there’s a good chance Ultimate Marvel Vs Capcom 3 is going to sing to you.

Not that it won’t sing to everyone else, whether you bought into the first game or not. It’s just that much of what UMvC3 is about, isn’t so much a new manifest of characters and backdrops, but what’s changed on a fundamental gameplay level across the full character landscape.

Many exploits have now been removed, such as the DHC glitch and X-Factor cross-screen combos that could destroy an opponent within seconds of the match starting. Scaling is also improved, with many of the original cast being given new moves, or updates to existing moves and specials to better balance the game’s heady Hyper activities.



A lot of the exploits might seem trivial to anyone else, but a quick YouTube scan of some of them will sate even the less enthused fighting game players out there (honestly, you’d Dragon Punch someone in real life if you were to sit through some of these exploits). Anyone who spent the time discovering these has now been put back into place, a good position for the intermediates of us out there, though it’s arguable the release of Ultimate Marvel Vs Capcom 3, with all its additions and changes, is just another starting point for said exploiters to start their discovery grind. But I digress. New UMvC3 changes equal good.

So what about the new characters? Well there are 12 in total, and it’s good to see the roster moving away from the more well-known characters and into realms of fan-service. This couldn’t be more exampled than by the inclusion of Phoenix Wright who has about as much right being on the field of battle as he does in a court room, but he’s an awesome character to play with, nonetheless. Doctor Strange, from the Marvel camp though, represents a thinking man’s character, with a set of ranged deployables that need a lot of focus and understanding to use properly. He’s the ultimate anti-brawler, and infinitely explorable and enticing as a result.

One of the [initially] cool features of the new game is the ability to actually play as Galactus, though it does have a bit of a gimmicky feel to it. It’s a somewhat limited affair though, and the novelty definitely wears off pretty quickly. Luckily then Capcom are promising a post-release free DLC pack that’ll feature some more single-player options to open the game up beyond being smashed, or smashing, online, in the form of a card collectible game that’ll allow you to augment your characters with new abilities. The verdict is still out on this addition though.

So there hasn’t been much of an expansion in game modes with the new outing, which is a shame, so it’ll depend on whether you own the original release or not, or just how invested you are in the mechanics -- and potential -- of the series on the whole as to whether or not this is worth forking out any cash for. It’s certainly not a huge expansion over the previous game, despite the addition of 12 new characters (who could have been delivered via DLC), but it makes sense to rebalance the original roster in the face of the new playable options, so fighting game fans needn’t worry too much about justification.