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.

Control
One of Marvel Nemesis’ greatest assets is its simple controls. Nothing is too difficult to pull off, due to the simple control scheme. The only problem is that the controls can be a little bit on the unresponsive side at times. I found myself going for a certain move several times that would get delayed. This doesn’t happen as often as it does in other games, but it’s still a nuisance. The fact that there is no real targeting system also makes things difficult too, throwing weapons around aimlessly doesn’t help much when your trying to take down an opposing Storm or Johnny Ohm from the sky to stop them from hitting you with a barrage of lighting attacks.



That's Venom. He doesn't like Spider-Man, apparently.
Sound
Like the controls featured in Marvel Nemesis, the sound is also quite simple. The music is passable, the sound effects decent, and the voice-overs are hit or miss, but the catchphrases said before and after each match are all incredibly cheesy. Take The Thing for example. After winning a match he will blurt out this classic line; “I just sprayed you with a can of whoop-ass!”

Graphics
At least the characters look good while they say cheesy lines and throw fists around aimlessly. The graphics in Marvel Nemesis are solid, the environments look good and the effects are pretty cool. The character models themselves look quite nice, with nice graphical touches like glares of light deflecting off of Iron Man’s armor to give it that sweet shine effect. The animations are also pretty fluid, but at times the game will glitch up and you will find your character floating around your opponent before actually flinging him or her to the ground.

Final Word
Being a huge fan of Marvel and fighting games in general, Marvel Nemesis was a game that I was looking forward to which had a lot of promise, but ultimately was a disappointment in almost every department. The game does have a lot of unlockables such as special photos, comics, and of course characters, but aside from that there really isn’t a whole lot to do after you unlock everyone, which won’t take long. My advice is to rent Marvel Nemesis if you’re curious, as I could only recommend this game as purchase if you absolutely love Marvel and fighting games and have friends to play with often. Despite all the negatives, this franchise still has a lot of untapped potential and I hope to see EA go back to the drawling board and give this another go.