After a partnership with Capcom that lasted almost ten years, five arcade titles (give or take), and countless console ports, Marvel has changed their fighting game affiliation to the biggest player in the third-party market; Electronic Arts. The product of their first collaboration is Marvel Nemesis: Rise of the Imperfects At first Marvel Nemesis looks like a solid fighter with an awesome premise- comic book superheros brawling with a new group of ultra cool villains, the Imperfects. Looks can sure as hell be deceiving.

Gameplay

At times unresponsive, frustrating, and downright cheap, Marvel Nemesis is a severe disappointment in the gameplay department. When I spent some hands-on time with the game awhile back, I personally enjoyed what I had played, but it had its flaws. Of course I figured these would be fixed by the time the game was released; boy was I wrong.

For starters the story mode is insanely boring and frustrating. You start off by facing a bunch of generic cronies, and after doing about 3 or 4 missions that seem identical, you will finally get to fight a boss character which is either an Imperfect or a tainted Marvel character. The problem is some of the fights are extremely unfair, since certain characters just overpower other ones and the AI exploits this by constantly performing the same move over and over again. For example, when you fight the tainted Storm with Wolverine, you will find yourself being struck with several powerful long range lighting attacks. Of course, Wolverine has no long range attacks and is purely a short range fighter, so getting close to Storm is a challenge in itself. Getting there with half your health bar intact is damn near impossible. On the bright side of things, the story is interesting and will keep you entertained, some very stylized cut scenes help move things along and each of the Imperfect characters get some of the more stylistic cut scenes to tell their interesting back stories.

With such a lackluster single player experience, one could only hope for the multi-player experience to fare a little better and thankfully it does just that. Thanks to the simple control scheme, playing against a friend is absolute blast. Two major problems though; in order to unlock the bulk of characters and arenas in the game, you will have to torture yourself by going through story mode. Also, there is only support for up to two players! This a game that suits four players perfectly, just like the game Nemesis takes a lot of cues from- Power Stone, home to some of the most fun to be had on a console at the time with four player matches.



That's Venom. He doesn't like Spider-Man, apparently.

On the online front, Marvel Nemesis fights like a champ with little to no lag. The game keeps track of your win-loss record and ranks you accordingly, but I don’t know how much weight those ranks hold because I am either just really good at this game or everyone online sucks because I played online for quite a long time and remain undefeated as of now. Regardless of my fighting prowess, this is a game that will keep Xbox Live fighting fans happy until November when Dead or Alive 4 releases for the 360.