In a year of great fighting games, it’s rather frustrating to see how disappointing Capcom’s Marvel vs Capcom Infinite turned out to be. A lackluster roster (seriously, no X-Men at launch?!), a story mode just for the sake of it and somewhat uneven gameplay changes make it the one of the least enjoyable fighters of the year. Regardless, it’s still a largely good game but when you compare to some of its predecessors, Infinite comes off as a halfhearted effort at best. Unfortunately, this kind of effort also shows in its effects in the art style and visuals.
Running on Unreal Engine 4 (the very same engine that was used for Capcom’s Street Fighter V), there seems to be minor improvements in visuals when one compares Infinite to Street Fighter V. The game uses an uninspiring art style and some weird character facial animations to get the “job” done. The game uses lower quality anisotropic filtering and lower quality alpha effects…and when you see games like Tekken 7 using the same engine and pushing the medium and genre further ahead, you have to wonder why Capcom isn’t able to do the same. Heck, even Injustice 2 which runs on a modified Unreal Engine 3 has better facial animations and particle effects than Marvel Vs Capcom Infinite. Hopefully the developers can get their act together for the next game, if it happens.
Regardless of its overall look and feel, one thing that Infinite does get it right is the frame rate. Across all console versions, Infinite runs at a rock solid 60 frames per second, although, the developers cut down the frame rate when you defeat somebody. This results into a rather jarring effect. Why did Capcom do that? It doesn’t create a positive effect on the presentation at all.
On the image quality front, we see the PS4 version leading the charge once again. Yes, it’s a native 1080p resolution compared to what looks like sub-HD on Xbox One. The PS4 Pro version on other hands seems like it benefits from improved resolution, better texture filtering and overall higher shadow effects. This makes the immediate details and the art style to pop out more than the base PS4 and Xbox One versions.
In the end, whatever platform you will play Infinite on, you are bound to receive a solid 60 frames per second (except the story cutscenes which run at 30 frames per second like every other fighter). Resolutions vary accordingly to the strength of each platform’s hardware. We will recommend Marvel vs Capcom Infinite only to the most hardcore fan of the series. For everyone else, there are better fighting games in the market.
Share Your Thoughts Below (Always follow our comments policy!)