Under the single player heading you have a good selection of modes to choose from, Arcade has you play through 8 stages, one on one, the better you perform, the more points you can score for the online ranking. Story is the main gaming area, here you will play as your chosen character, playing through the intertwined stories of other characters. The story mode is where most of you will start as it gives all of the great cut scenes you have come to expect from SC games, however a few are reused and at times, text is used, which is a bit of a letdown. During the story mode, depending on who you play as, you will be joined by other characters on your quest, you can change to play either of these with RB, but it works both ways, so at times you will have to fight through 3 enemies with only one health bar, at times this can be a real challenge. The newest addition to the SC series is the Tower of Lost Souls mode. It is a 60 floor tower full of opponents and equipment to defeat and collect. To start with you can only ascend the tower, but once you defeat the boss you are able to descend and takeout all who want to get in your way.

 

 

As with all of the modes you can choose from a healthy roster of old characters like Mitsurgi, Voldo, Cervantes and a few new ones like Yoda (or Darth on the PS3 version) and the apprentice. SC however ups the ante by giving you an amazing customization mode to create your own characters using basic fighting styles of the main characters as the starter template.

 

The scope to customize is amazing and of course the more you open up in the single player modes, the more you can use here. Quite cleverly the game also shows you what type of characters you can design by actually making you fight in the Tower of Lost Souls mode, for instance in one floor you have to fight a load of pirates, each with their own look, voice and fighting style. This is where the game take a bit of a sharp turn in the difficulty section, the level of areas that you can change and tinker with is amazing and almost RPG like in presentation, but this will only really appeal to really hard core gamers, having played with a variety of friends this area seemed to scare them off as it was far to confusing, plus the instructions offer no real help at all, they just assume you know what you are doing, even myself, being a gamer of 20 odd years found myself a bit lost at points.

 

Graphically this game rocks, the arenas are great, taking damage as you take heavy falls, and the characters, including the custom ones look and move realistically, they are even able to lose some of their clothing when in battle if they take too many hits essentially fighting in battle scarred grundies and knickers.

 

The most important area of any fighting game is the playability, it needs to be spot on otherwise you will have a Primal Rage on your hands, and no one wants that game again. Thankfully the twitch reaction work really well with the horizontal, vertical strikes and kicks all being very responsive. However here is where another SC problem occurs, once you have moved through some of the more basic moves, the specials and combos become ridiculously difficult to pull off, after the combos you also have Ukemi moves, Guard Impact, Just Impact, then you have the Soul Gauge, Soul Crush, Critical Finish and for the Star Wars characters a Force Gauge. Now I think I am a mediocre fighting game player but I found it impossible to pull of some of these moves, especially the Critical Finish, which after 8 hours of play and lots of attempts I still have not been able to do. The game and the instructions tell you its just a press of the LB at a certain time, but no matter how hard I try I cant pull the damn thing off, most of the time leaving me open to a barrage of ass whipping in the process.

 

You also have a pretty solid versus mode both online and off. Locally you have the Special Versus were you have to use custom fighters and skills and Standard Versus were its more of a level playing field. Online offers the same modes but of course here you can play anyone. Having played a few games online I am pretty impressed at the speed and ferocity of the games, but sadly again this may scare off the newer players as the level of online play is really high.

 

This is by far the best fighting game out for the consoles at the moment, but it is not necessary great, hard core fighting fans will love this game, newbie’s will probably play for a bit and then forget about it due to the over complex nature of the controls and options.