Marvel Super Heroes

"It's Street Fighter the MARVEL way!"

Marvel Super Heroes is based on many comic series and a graphic novel called the Infinity Gaulet. A being called Adam Warlock battles Titan's demi-god, Thanos, in the quest to find the six Infinity Gemstones, reality, soul, time, space, power, and mind. Separately, they are powerful, but together could make someone a living GOD over the entire universe. Warlock enlits the aid of Earth's super beings such as the X-men (Psylocke, Wolverine), the Avengers (Captain America, Iron man), Spider-man and the Hulk. Along the way, they face opponents who want the gems for their own personal use like Dr. Doom, Magneto, Juggernaut, Blackheart and Shuma-Gorath (before I go on, let me tell you a little about him. He is not a new character like Psylocke and Blackheart. He's just not popular. His first comic book appearence was in Marvel Premiere #9 and 10, published in 1973, as a multi-tentacled, slug-like demon who preyed upon humanity in prehistory. He was defeated by Dr. Strange, but caused the death of his mentor, the Ancient One. I don't know other comic appearences he made after that. Why Capcom chose him over Dr. Octopus I'll never know.). Let the battle begin.

What's not to say that has already been said before about the fantastic graphics. The backgrounds are very detailed as well as being fully animated. The artwork matches that of Night Warriors and slightly improves over X-men:COTA. The animation is fast, but for some reason, it gets only slightly faster when you put it in turbo. It's not as fast as the turbo in X-men:COTA. The only times there are slowdowns are when you have big characters like Juggernaut, Hulk and Blackheart with a few missing frames on them. I found out that if the disc is dirty, the game goes as slow as a snail.

There are 50 tracks of music on the audio CD, but most of it sound bland. Maybe because they all sound like they came from the same instrument. The songs I like are Spider-man, Captain America, Dr. Doom and the endings. The rest I didn't care about. The sound effects improved over previous fighting games, however, by adding more sounds like Wolverine running and more vocabulary on each characters.

The controls are OK, though it's difficult to pull one out at the right moment, like the dragon punch (Capt. America's Stars and Stripes and Spider-man's Spider-sting) and the charging attacks like Hulk's Gamma Charge and Shuma's Mystic stare and charge. In order to do the latter move, you have to hold back for 2 seconds, then forward plus punch or kick. The problem I have with that is I don't HAVE two seconds sometimes. You'll have practice because some of the moves are sometimes either dull or very senitive to execute.

The area of gameplay suffers the most. It seems that Capcom heard the complaints about how hard playing X-men is and decided to respond on this game. The problem is it's TOO easy. There are some characters like Spider-man, Iron Man, Dr.Doom and Thanos who would put up a fight, but the other like the Hulk and Magneto think that they're in pratice mode (there isn't any) and just stand there being open targets. There are only two play modes and one of them has the option to fix the rounds, either 5, 3, or 1, which is a poor placement to the survival mode. The difficulty level have no effect whatsoever, either. What saves this game barely, is playing as your favorite Marvel characters in an anime, action pacted battle. That, and to be able to get two hidden characters (three, if you got the import version).

This is a great game to rent, if not buy, if you like to invite your friends over for a super heroes battle royale or to practice some new, in-depth moves. But as a solo game, it is not as hard as the stories display in the comic series. Stick with the X-men, if you like a good challenge.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 03/21/00, Updated 03/21/00