• Posted November 7th, 2012 at 08:24 EDT by Fraser Miller
• 0 Comments

It wasn't too long ago that Capcom brought the two titan fighters Street Fighter and Tekken together on the PlayStation 3 for smashing fun, now it is the PlayStation Vita's turn. Taking everything from the PS3 version across, it is nothing short of amazing what has been accomplished on the handheld, visually and mechanically. Packing in just about everything a fighting fan can dream of and more.

There is a great feeling you get while dashing about, dishing out blow for blow on your foe while you hold your PS Vita in your hand. Visually, this game has it all. The characters have the classic lick of paint that was around in the previous Street Fighter entry, Capcom has done a fantastic job of bringing the Tekken characters in to fit the Street Fighter vibe. The backgrounds were something that really caught me by surprise, apart from the distraction they can cause, they are excellent at providing varied arenas to compete in. They also include some fun action going on, like dinos beating each other up, and other characters floating outside in space and then being chased by 80s-like-spaceships. This all adds to a great experience when you are thrashing around trying to link combos together to defeat your opponents.

But let's not forget the characters themselves. Capcom has done a superb job in bringing the entire collection of fighters over to the Vita and making them move just as solidly and smoothly as its big counter-part. Gamers are spoiled for choice on who they can choose from in the huge array of over 50 fighters, split between the two universes, including the exclusive characters Cole MacGrath from Infamous, Mega Man and Sony mascots own Toro Inoue and his rival Kuro who cameo as Ryu and Kazuya.

Every fighter has excellent controlling on the system, Capcom has even gone as far as to add in touch controls, which were surprisingly great to use, though they do take a bit of getting use to. You can grab opponents from a right swipe to tapping in one of four areas to piece together your combos. Though if this isn't for you, the physical buttons are there and it handles like it should, fast-paced, adrenaline fueled fighter with solid controls. Pitching gamers against A.I. or other games in a two on two fashion is almost similar to the tag system used with Tekken Tag, but it just adds to the speed and forces you to think on your toes.

The story for Street Fighter X Tekken is perhaps its weakest point, feeling somewhat slung in there to appease those that look for one. It revolves around a strange dangerous cube like object crashing on Earth, located somewhere in the middle of Antarctica. The object, which has been named "Pandora's Box" by scientists, gives off powerful waves of energy when conflict happens near it. So Arcade mode involves taking your favorite characters on a session of figure bleeding fights in order to hopefully claim your prize at the end of the journey. Apart from minor intros from voice-overs with characters there isn't much else. It would have been nice to have something more meaningful to fight for rather than simple fight after fight. But thankfully you can take it online to compete with people from around the world for some awesome challenges. Hopefully you won't get your butt kicked.

If there is one thing that Street Fighter X Tekken does have however, is that it has plenty of content for you to smash your way through, from the arcade, to the story, versus allowing to set attributes of the battles and dive right in to kicking about the A.I. till your heart is content. Capcom seems to have ironed out some of the kinks in network gameplay, enabling you to take on players across the PlayStation Network in either one on one ranked matches, endless battles with winners carrying on to the next round, or even scramble battles, an interesting feature allowing for four players to fight at the same time in teams of two. There is also the inclusion of a replay channel, giving you the chance to watch high ranked players compete against each other or check out how you fair in your own ... (continued on next page)