I’ve played this game twice so far. I spent a while with it at E3 and said I thought it had good potential. Then I played again last night at the LA Fight Night event (which was really fun by the way!), and… http://twitter.com/#!/ultradavid/status/117152362115768320
By the end of the night the SFxT machines had way fewer people in general than the UMvC3 machines did, so I guess we weren’t the only ones who felt this. Now, the game has a long road ahead of it. Maybe the existing game mechanics will be altered, maybe there’ll be new ones, who knows. It’s not my intention to proclaim that the game will be bad, and I hope it won’t be! These are just my impressions from the build last night.
Pandora seems terrible right now, almost like why even bother having it in. It’s real easy to run away from or just block against right now, only lasts 7 seconds and doesn’t give much of a speed boost (if any? I don’t know). When you raw tag, the character leaving (although not the one entering) has invincibility, so if your point is low on life and your 2nd isn’t, you can just raw tag to eat up like 2 pandora seconds. Basically pandora is only usable if there are 6 seconds left on the clock and your opponent doesn’t have much more life than you do. We weren’t really using the overheads you can combo out of, so pandora will probably get better when we do that. But with your 2nd character dead, it’s not like you can set up unblockables or anything. Not that I’m complaining. If there has to be a comeback mechanic, I’m fine with it not being very useful heh.
That mode where you call your partner in and you both attack the opponent (I always forget the name) also seems bad. Your partner isn’t pegged to your button inputs right now, it’s basically like the CPU comes out and does whatever it wants with your 2nd character regardless of what you’re doing with your point character. It seemed like you just had to get lucky with the CPU picking something useful to do heh.
I also feel like a lot of the characters are redundant. Like here’s what the game seems like to me for lots of characters: play footsies with jab/short while buffering into strong/forward or fierce/roundhouse, confirm any jab-strong series or whatever into launcher into tag combo. Ding! Except some characters have faster or better ranged jabs than others, so why play the others? Maybe this is due to our lack of understanding of the characters and the engine, maybe we need to put in more work? I dunno. And yes, some characters want to do different things. But my impression was that lots of characters want to do the same thing and some are just better at it.
Anyway. Hugo and Zangief seem pretty good as far as grapplers go, but meh, grapplers always seem good when this kind of game comes out. In SF4 people thought Zangief was top tier for months, and that craziness has somehow remained with him even as he’s been nerfed in each new version. So it’s hard to know if Hugo and Gief will actually end up good in SFxT. But they have faster walk speeds than the grapplers in 4, they both seem to have good jabs and shorts (I’m tellin you, I think this is super important), they both deal damage well, etc. I don’t think Capcom had programmed their supers into this build of the game so I couldn’t test those out. But I like Hugo’s normals, his cr mk sweep is good. For Zangief being able to buffer jab/short into far stand roundouse into launcher is super good, way better than jab/short buffer ex hand in 4. Hugo’s running bear grab was better than Gief’s. His claps had sick hitboxes and started pretty fast. And his clothesline takes like a quarter of a second to start, but once he gets going that thing moves lightning fast, and his startup isn’t obvious looking at all, kinda looks like he’s just standing there. Gief’s lariat is still a sick antiair. Both characters had good spd range, maybe a little less than Gief’s jab spd in AE. Gief’s ex hand is faster and knocks down. They both had all the normals and specials we expected and they pretty much work like how we expected too.
Dhalsim is real funky in a game where everything juggles. Threw a yoga fire, opponent jumped and landed on it, I juggled with toward+fierce. I threw a fierce fire, opponent was on the ground and got knocked off his feet, I juggled with cr mp. I dunno if he can juggle a regular antiair normal into more normals or supers or whatever, never got to try. By the way all his far limbs are done as toward or down-toward + button, if you just press buttons normally you’ll get the versions that were back or down-back in SF4.
I tried using Rolento but I never played him in other games, so… that didn’t go too well.
Also, we noticed you couldn’t cancel into specials out of a chain even if the last hit of the chain you did would normally be cancelable. So like Dhalsim cr mp is cancelable, but if you do cr lp cr mp xx yoga fire, the fire won’t come out. I thought I remembered being able to do that at E3, but I don’t remember for sure. I heard Tekken characters CAN do that still, but I never tried myself.
Anyway, like I said, I only spent 10 minutes on the game and then went back to hang out with my friends, so I couldn’t get a ton of info. But those are my impressions!
I hope the game ends up good.
