Marvel vs Capcom 2 is one of the best beat-’em ups to ever grace home consoles – fact. When it came out I remember spending hours with my friends playing with each characters, figuring out the best teams to play with. In face I owned the game on PS2, Xbox and now the game proudly sits on my PS3 hardrive as one of my top played games. So another release for the game can only be good, right?

Thankfully in Marvel vs Capcom 2 no modes seem to have been stripped from the game. This means you can enjoy all of the gametypes and characters that you enjoyed playing with, on home consoles.

For those of you who are not familiar with the series, Marvel vs Capcom 2 is a beat-’em up where characters from each brand can battle against one another. Fights take place in teams of three, with players being able to tag in and out and even use their partner to quickly jump into the game and assist them. If you’ve ever wondered who would win in a fight between Spider-Man and Ryu or Jill Valentine and Rogue, this is the game you want to be playing. The game’s design is absolutely brilliant and on my little iPhone it looks amazing, unfortunately the same cannot be said for the controls.

The virtual buttons seem to take up too much of the screen most of the time. There are only two punch and kick buttons, but when you add these to an input for special attacks and tagging in your partner, your small phone screen starts to feel covered. At times it is hard to see, what is going on if you are playing with the control scheme displays the most buttons. You can go to a control scheme with less buttons but I found this confusing to adapt to and when I did play it only improved matters slightly.

Capcom have done their best to try to make the controls easier with a special button. By flicking the button you can quickly pull of special moves, super combos and ultras.  The problem with this is that you have to be rather precise with so many buttons cluttering the screen and it can be hard to do in the heat of battle, especially as this all works on a touch device. It’s far too easy to lose a game just because you’ve lost sight of a button and just missed it.

The on-screeen controls and quick speed of the fights are the main problems with Marvel vs Capcom 2 for the iOS. It is well designed and work has been done to simplify the game for mobile devices, but it just does not work. The frantic nature of this title makes it very hard to play at a high level, something which I am used to doing. So playing this almost feels frustrating at times as I can’t always pull off moves when I want to.

Marvel vs Capcom 2 also locks off half of the characters in the game.  If you want to play with all the characters you will have to slog through the arcade mode several times. For a mobile game this is an odd decision, as most players want to quickly jump in for just two minutes.

There is a mutiplayer mode that you can play in , but unfortunately I have no friends that like the game enough to download it and play it with me, although other reports claim that this is sturdy and works well.

The formula in this masterpiece has not been changed from what it is. It still looks pretty good and it’s a blast playing with such a varied roster of characters, the problem is just the hardware that it is on. For now you can get it off on the App Store for £2, but if you want to play Marvel vs Capcom 2 properly then get it on a home console.

 

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