Fighting game enthusiasts all over were anxiously waiting to get a chance to play the early build of Capcom’s latest crossover attempt, Street Fighter x Tekken, at E3 this week. I got a chance to mess around with it a bit myself, and my impression of the game so far is..... well, it feels kind of weird.

My main gripe with the game as it is right now is that it doesn’t really feel like Street Fighter, or Tekken. In fact, it actually feels more like a Marvel game than anything else, (which may be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on how you feel about Marvel). This largely ties to one of the games primary features, the launcher attack. Replacing the Focus Attack from SF4, the launcher does exactly as the name implies: it launches your opponent into the air, and, at the same time, switches your partner into the fray.

This attack can be done in two different ways. The first method is to just simply hit both heavy attack buttons to perform the move by itself, which uses up 1/3 of your super meter. The other, and more logical way, is to use it while performing a combo, which is a universal light, medium, heavy punch string, then following that with another heavy to perform the attack. Whichever method you use, once you land it, your partner runs in, and you can continue your combo from there.

Now, at this point, something in your brain should be telling you that something isn’t right here. Out of all the methods one has at their disposal to swap partners, other than simply doing the normal command, the launcher swap combo is the only one that doesn’t require meter, and it allows you to continue your combo. This essentially means that you can do ridiculous amounts of damage in one combo, simply by swapping characters back and forth, all without using any meter at all. Combine this with the fact that you only need to knockout one person of your opponent’s two man team in order to win a round, and you have a formula that could bring up some questions regarding game balance.

The other thing that failed to get me interested was the visuals. If you’ve so much as glanced at SF4 at some point, then you’ll be able to instantly recognize the graphics style used in SFxT, since they’re essentially the same thing. One can also notice that the character models that are in the game on Capcom’s side are pretty much the same as well, albeit with a couple new animations to accommodate the launcher moves. Dynamic camera angles during some attacks and active background scenes may keep your attention for a little bit, but for the most part, it’s not anything you haven’t seen before. On the other hand, the Tekken characters actually fit in rather well to this kind of style, so it’s not a complete crapshoot.

So far, I haven’t been too impressed with the game, though maybe it’s because I’ve paid witness to Capcom’s old recycling habits and overall lack of creativity for years already. At this point, it’s more of a question of what they haven’t recycled yet that I’m more interested in. The gameplay isn’t exactly thrilling either. I could be missing something here, though, and it’s still fairly early in development, so they could be able to turn things around. For the moment, though, I get more amusement out of hearing that one of the stronger teams in the game right now is Bob/Sagat.