Hello guys from Hive Gaming, I hope you are all having a great time.

There have been a lot of crossovers in the videogames world, but few have surprised me as much as X-Men vs. Street Fighter, this is a very interesting fighting game I got to experience in a time when it wasn’t common to see titles that put together characters from different franchises.

The first difference we can notice in this game compared to other Capcom’s titles from the 90’s is the gameplay, in this game the gameplay is two versus two. In the amount of fighters from which we can choose, we have members of the mutant patrol like Cyclops, Wolverine, Storm or Magneto, while from the Street Fighter side there are characters like Ryu, Ken, Cammy, Chun-Li, among others.

The best part of having two fighters at hand is that you can switch them at any moment during the battle. While one of them is not on the screen, his or her health will heal automatically; this makes the combat more strategic since we need to learn how to administrate well our characters to stop them from being defeated too soon. It’s worth mentioning that the life of the character that is off screen will only heal until it reaches the end of the red part of the bar and if we change our character before this happens, the rest of the red part will disappear and we will lose that part of the health bar.

It is really cool how the combat rhythm is frenetic, and allows the player to make devastating combinations of hits, in fact one of the game’s mechanics is to send your enemy flying and jump up to give him or her a good beating that look awesome and causes a lot of damage, nevertheless the movements that result the most spectacular looking and lethal are the powerful super combos.

To make the majority of the special attacks we have to make a half circle to the front or the back using the directions pad of the controller and right after press the two kick buttons or the two punches buttons (they are easy to do). These super combos go from quick body combat like in the case of Wolverine to strong energy attacks like in the case of Ryu, It’s worth mentioning that all the characters have at least one of these super moves and the best part is that you can also use these attacks in a double set with both characters at the same time.

This game also has a counterattack mechanic that you can execute against your rival by calling your partner, he or she will make a quick attack that could save us from defeat in more than one dangerous situation, but making this will use one of the power bars we have managed to collect. Besides, we can also make another move that will push our rival as long as we are protecting ourselves; this is some kind of parry that requires precision since it must be done at the right time.

On the other hand, something that results interesting to me is how at the end of the game, after defeating the final boss, in this case Apocalypse, we have to face our own ally to be able to see the ending of the character we are playing as. This seems like a good way to get more replayability value because we have to finish the game several times to see the endings of each character.

When it comes to the visual aspect I think the design of all the fighters are very well recreated (specially the mutants) and the characters have really smooth and fluid animations, the special effects of the super combos are amazing and l think the detail in the backgrounds getting destroyed as a result of the fights is pretty impressive. The soundtrack is great, it has several classic themes from Street Fighter reinterpreted and each mutant has an epic melody.

In conclusion, revisiting this game was very fun, it made me remember the good times I had entering the world of fighting games in the arcades I use to visit in a time when everything was more simple. Besides I think the game has aged quite well with the passing of time and the best part is that this was where a great fighting franchise started.