Black Panther, Monster Hunter & Sigma hit Marvel vs Capcom Infinite
Infinite Pricing
Marvel vs Capcom Infinite is a maddening game. At heart, it's a solid addition to the classic Capcom tag-team fighting series. A festival of explosions, colours, superheroic excess and Capcom's forgotten characters dusted off for a cameo. Unfortunately, it's also a mess of questionable design decisions and bizarre corner-cutting, letting down an otherwise excellent core experience.
The latest of these questionable decisions is the choice to sell three characters featured in the main story of the game as paid DLC shortly after release. This week on Tuesday, Black Panther, Monster Hunter and Sigma arrived for the price of £6.49/$8 each, on top of the £40 you've already paid. Ouch.
To be fair, these three do look like fun characters to play as. Black Panther is a little early to represent his solo film debut next year, but seems like an easy pick for series fans, adopting most of Wolverine's role. The similarity runs deep, with a few of his moves looking close to being copied directly if not from Wolverine, then his beefier counterpart Sabertooth - the hairy Canadian and nemesis absent due to Marvel's push towards promoting their current crop of movie heroes.
Capcom villain Sigma looks a little more distinct, capturing most of his moves from the Megaman X series, including his teleport counters and maddeningly wide, horribly overpowered downward lightsaber slashes. No, I'm not at all bitter that he killed me approximately a hojillion times back on the SNES. Shut up.
Monster Hunter looks the most fun of the three. A versatile character with good ranged and combo options thanks to packing several weapons from her original games. From the looks of the trailer above, some of her moves boast absurd amounts of damage-soaking Super Armor too, allowing her to power blindly through other character's attacks at the cost of health. It's just a pity that these three characters alone add up to the price of half a game.
Beyond the new characters, they also rolled out a significant patch to the game. Among the various tweaks (full notes here) are fixes to a couple of completely inescapable infinite combos which were wreaking havoc on the competitive rankings for the game. All in all, it hasn't been Capcom's greatest launch.
You can get these three characters for £6.49/$8, or as part of the £25/$30 season pass, which will be adding Venom, Black Widow and the Winter Soldier further down the line. Personally, I'm waiting for the inevitable re-release of the game with every character, costume and fix already in place.