Sony and Marvel have collaborated again, and the result is Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, a title that’s quite visually ambitious and has proven to be quite technically polished during our time with it. We’ve spent several hours laying waste to opponent teams across the game’s available platforms, which include the PC, PS5, and PS5 Pro, looking to see if the visuals hold up under the strain that this game offers with its heavy effects focused gameplay loop.
It’s a lot of good news overall, but the console versions are remarkably straightforward to talk about as opposed to a slightly more complex situation on the PC. As always, we’re happy to dive right into it all. Let’s go.
A Superb-Looking Fighter
We’re very happy with the art style and how evocative it is of the comic books that likely brought many of the game’s players on board in the first place. The Unreal Engine 5 foundation makes for a strong visual presentation of the stylized animations that the excellent character models pull off, their facial details communicating their reaction to situations very convincingly indeed. A lot of their innate personalities slip through, from Spider-Man’s smug self-assurance to The Hulk’s barely-contained fury, and the accompanying visual effects that accompany their attacks, supers, and transitions are all handled well, allowing the spectacle of each battle to shine through across all playable platforms.
The stages that battles take place on are also well-designed with a lot of environmental detail in the foreground as well as in the background. There’s a lot going on at any given moment, and it helps set the scene very well as you try to observe what’s going on while fending off attacks from all angles against a talented opponent. Of course, we’d understand if the animation quality on each attack proves enough of a distraction, as it’s quite lovely across the board and really sells a unique vibe to each character and adds impact to each hit.
PS5 Pro vs PS5 Versions
On consoles, jumping into a battle is a breeze thanks to extremely fast loading times, particularly during transitions into matches or rematches. Overall, this one’s a technically impressive title that’s making good use of its hardware to bring a very unique art direction to life, the tech and creative vision working very well together to achieve that. It’s easily among the finest lookers among contemporary fighting games today.
But as happy as we were with that, it was a tad disappointing to see no options for graphics/performance modes, or even any toggles on either the PS5 or PS5 Pro. For a title that’s Pro-Enhanced, we expected to find some options to fiddle around with, but alas, there were none to be found. It’s only a nitpick since both consoles target and manage to sustain a locked 60 PS, making the action flow along quite smoothly.
Speaking of meeting targets, the PS5 Pro makes excellent use of PSSR to produce a crisper upscaled image at 4K, with fine details, edges, and distant background elements looking noticeably cleaner. Of course, that’s not to say that this one’s base PS5 version is bad on the graphical front, with only minor performance differences and perhaps occasional drops on the lower-specced console. The experience isn’t fundamentally different on the Pro, but it does look sharper on it.
That covers the console versions. It’s time to take on the PC version, and talk about the unfolding situations a little.
A Complicated PC Release
We’re getting this out of the way early: our experience with Fighting Souls on PC was excellent on a test configuration that consisted of a Ryzen 9 5950X, and an RTX 3080 Ti which was quite comfortable ahead of the recommended specs. The graphics menu on offer was quite modest, and while some players may not mind the limited selection, we’d have preferred a much broader range of advanced settings.
We went ahead with everything maxed out and DLSS Quality at 4K, and we’re given mostly excellent 60 FPS performance, with any drops coming from character introductions/transitions instead of the actual fights. Gameplay performance remained quite stable throughout our test weekend, with loading times similar to the console versions making getting to the next match quite quick.
Against the PS5 Pro, the PC version wins out when running the game at maxed settings with 4K DLSS Quality. We kind of expected that, but it’s very impressive how close the PS5 Pro gets to the experience on offer. Yes, the PC version had finer details, and more clarity with better native image quality, but the Pro did manage to put out a more consistent frame delivery. It’s quite a close contest between the two platforms this time around, and while the PC wins on the image quality front, the PS5 Pro isn’t too far behind.
However, the criticism that the PC version is receiving from other players bears mentioning. Reports of stuttering and frame-time problems, unexpected drops in frame rates, and inconsistent performance have come up from hardware that should be capable of running the game without problems. We’d advise keeping in mind that a fighting game is a lot more sensitive since 60 FPS isn’t just cosmetic, but a necessary part of a fun experience.
While we couldn’t reproduce any of the issues other players experienced on our test rig, the sheer number of complaints mean that Arc Systems Works must sit up and take notice before it loses out on a key part of its player base, a facet made even more crucial by its availability only on PC and PlayStation. But we’re quite confident that the PC version can be brought up to scratch with a little bit of timely intervention from the developers.
Console Versions Are Better, For Now
As far as its visuals and graphical performance is concerned, Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls is definitely an exceptionally attractive fighter regardless of the platform you’re playing it on. The PS5 presents you with excellent image quality, rock-solid 60 FPS, and very little to complain about as far as sustaining those targets goes. The PS5 Pro takes that up a notch with PSSR facilitating a cleaner version of the already solid presentation on board, but we think that not giving players options to tweak graphical settings is an omission.
Of course, the PC version should be the champion but since that applies only when it works as intended, we couldn’t honestly recommend that version of the game to you as it is right now. Yes, our test system gave us excellent results and we’ve nothing but good things to say about our own time with the game, but other players’ reports are troubling, unless Arc Systems Works manages to get some good fixes in before interest in the PC version of the game begins to wane altogether.
It looks like Fighting Souls does its best work on PC when everything is running as intended, but the PS5 Pro’s cleaner image closes the gap considerably over the already brilliant PS5 version. In fact, it gets close enough to the PC experience that the difference between the two systems can start to feel a little too close for comfort.
That’s all we’ve got for you with this one. Now if you’ll excuse us, we’ve got a bit more fighting left in our day.
