Recent reviews by Arc

Netplay is hot garbage. Regularly you will suffer severe rollbacks on servers where you allegedly have 30ms connections. Its getting more noticeable and frequent as time goes on. Given the only things you really have to do is play other people, having the play other people have a 20% chance of being absolutely miserable because of server issues is just a little too much.

Maybe use some of that bundle money to fix this Aether Studios.

It's amazing. The core mechanics are good, the balancing is good, match making is good, netcode is good, crossplatform and all of the supplemental stuff outside of the core 1v1 fighting are fun. Hands down this sets the standard for what a fighting game should be at launch. It's a no brainer to recommend for both hardcore fighting gamers and casuals who just want to button mash. Capcom really delivered with this launch and nailed the landing on everything.

This is purely based on the technical performance. It's super disappointing. I'm running a 3080, i9 10900k, 64gb of RAM and finding textures flicker on 1440p at a locked 60fps. This game doesn't look good enough to be struggling with my hardware like it is. No amount of setting tinkering seems to get something that feels acceptable. It either consistently looks bad or I get to deal with random super distracting texture flickering.

How's the gameplay? I dunno, it seems like it might have potential but the weird technical performance is so distracting it just pulls me out of the experience.

Luminous and Square Enix should be ashamed for a game to release like this. Maybe if there's a significant performance patch there's hope, but right now this is just a frustrating mess to get running and looking good.

Edit:
Messed with settings more after exploring more settings configs from what people did on the forums, reddit and youtube. Managed to get it at a frame rate that swings wildly from 50-120fps with out rhyme or reason. Graphically it still looks meh, but it's stabilized. No amount of fiddling though seems to allow better texture quality without it eventually eating into the vram and doing the texture flicker.

You'll notice most reviews have only like two hours in before giving a glowing review. Well, there's a reason for that. The game starts fine with a great looking art style, amazing soundtrack, and interesting fun characters. After the first two or three stages, I too thought this was an amazing game. Then I played six more stages and felt the enthusiasm get sucked out of me. This is a game where your mileage will vary quiet a bit. If you are looking for a rhythm based simple beat'em up with light platforming elements you'll be very happy. If you are looking for a fluid exciting action game you are going to be left feeling lied to.

The first design decision I really want to call out that just disrupts the flow of the game is an over reliance on partner abilities to fight enemies. Before you can interact with an enemy you need to hit them with a specific partner attack, sometimes multiple times. These partner attacks are on cool down, this means that fights often feel like you spend a decent amount of time flailing around dodging and parrying before you are actually able to engage in the fight. It's much akin to a more obnoxious version of what the Ninja Theory DMC did with the red and blue attacks. It's not hard to deal with, avoiding everyone for the opening section of a fight isn't hard, it's just a tedious chore.

In fact let's address the comparisons to games like Devil May Cry and Bayonetta. The similarity is that you explore an area a bit, get locked in a combat room, and then get scored at the end of that combat room. You can also by new unlocks from the shop with gears you picked up in the stage. That's about where the comparisons end. Both DMC and Bayonetta give you access to new individual moves as well as combos, Hi-Fi Rush only gives you combos and supers. This has an unfortunate consequence of making everything you do feel rather same-y as every string starts with the same weak or heavy attack and the difference between doing most combos is string length and a slightly different ender. Some combos end in the air or do a little better job with crowd control, but by and large it feels rather lacking in variety. This simplicity was likely done to keep the rhythm game aspect simple, but it also means if you come in expecting something as rich as like Devil May Cry 5's combat system you are going to be disappointed.

The game seems to be really proud of it's call and answer parry system which is this mechanic where you are locked in place and shown a series of button prompts for parrying and/or dodging. Then after it's shown what to expect the enemy lunges at you and you have to hit those buttons in a rhythm. It looks great, it plays fine enough at first, but eventually it just becomes yet another sequence that isn't very fun yet the frequency of them increase as you keep going. It all feels like just another way to have more quick time events.

The ratio of chore to fun just gets worse the longer I play and at this point I feel myself checking out because I'm just not having fun. I came in expecting something more action oriented, but so many of the tedious design decisions just interrupt flow of the game and they keep getting tacked on the longer the game runs. I really wanted to like this game because it looks and sounds great, but there's no depth of combat that I usually need for these kind of things to sustain interest.

The Good

Game play itself is good. It's got some cool high execution stuff and characters are well designed. The team based design is well thought out. It's really fun to use different characters and see the various synergies built into their kits. For example Superman's freeze breath can interact with his own teams projectiles enhancing them by caking them in ice. And there's lots of neat interactions baked into every fighter with other fighters. Perks are a wonderful system that wildly change up play styles for a single character. Add to it the option of stacking them on both teammates adds an element of strategy. While grinding to pay gold (free currency) for perks isn't super fun, you can share perks with teammates, making it way easier to strategically stack perks.

Playing with a friend is also exceptional and makes the game better in every way. The fact this gets you extra rewards is a nice touch.

In terms of aesthetics the fully voiced characters have really well thought out animations. The interactions in terms of dialog between characters is really great. There's a lot of love and attention that went into making everyone's moves look perfect.

The Bad
Game is especially money hungry even for a free to play title. So much so that it just leaks into the game design. Every aspect of it is designed to be as unrewarding and unfulfilling as possible. In three days the reward progress went from generous to reasonable to non-existent. I'm fine with paying for cosmetics, but the progression for gold is painful. The battle pass requires more exp for every level making even getting new tiers start to feel like a massive painful grind. I already paid for the premium pass, why make this so unfun? It all feels super manipulative. Then there's stuff like characters rotating out every week that isn't conveyed in the game anywhere but a random faq on a page most players will never see.

Matchmaking is also just kinda busted. You'll get an obvious new player on your team against two level 16 players with a kitted out set and just get rocked. Or you'll be the level 16 player against two low levels and stomp them. There's never a well balanced match. 1v1s are slightly better at match making but still seem off. The only credit I can give it is that you get into matches mad fast.

The netcode is just kind of mediocre, with frequent disconnects from server. Match making not honoring no crossplay until you go to re-match and then erroring out of the lobby. Rubber banding is a frequent and frustrating occurrence.

The Overall
There's a diamond in the rough. I think matchmaking should improve with a ranked mode, and the game itself is fun. That said the aggressively unrewarding aspects of both gold and the battlepass make it a little hard to recommend as something to put money into. So I do not recommend doing that. As a free option though, I think this game is worth it if you can put up with the glacial pace you unlock things.

Good game that could be great with the proper update. TMNT SR is a good game, well worth your $25. It's a fun casual beat'em up. Looks great, sounds great, and at a casual level is super great. If all you want is a wild romp through story mode and maybe a casual arcade run here and there, you can rest assured the game is great. The problems with the game surface when you want more depth.

Currently the scoring system is super limited so there's not a lot of ways you can really rack up a high score outside of like farming enemies that farm mousers. There's nothing like Streets of Rage 4's combo system where keeping high combos rewards a ton of points making a full clear a really interesting and fun prospect to strive for. Combos mean nothing.

The next big problem is just some odd design choices. Throws aren't invincible, so you are stuck eating damage every time you do a grab. Which makes throwing always feel bad and a tool you never want to engage with. You are unable to act out of dodge beyond dodge attacks which makes dodging feel worse than it has to, while I get the devs probably didn't want multiple dodge rolls in a row, they could have allowed for jumps or sprints and had an internal cooldown on the dodge to handle that more gracefully. Charged moves not being able to change direction feels weird. Back attacks are inconsistent (mapping to a button would probably help this). Rising attacks can also feel inconsistent and would benefit greatly by being mapped to a one of the two unused buttons. Lastly it would be nice to have more options for special canceling since that would make specials a defensive tool as much as an offensive tool.

The base game is lovely as it is designed, with some tweaks to cater to a more hardcore audience there'd be a lot to love, and this could be done without sacrificing the casual experience at all. In fact having more options and a constantly relevant combo counter might have prevented the taunt meta from taking hold in the first place.

This game has the makings of a good competitive game. As it stands the netplay is trash though. And this game is all netplay, the single player content is more bare bones than SF5 at launch.

If you are advertising Rollback, most of the matches should feel good. Instead it's the same stuff we've come to expect from Smash Ultimate Online. Inputs eaten, lag messing up tech timings, and character teleporting all over because of one sided rollbacks. It's really not fun when on any given night 20-50% of the matches you enter are just a laggy mess.

The most fun I've had in an MMO in years. Hooked and can't stop playing.

If you want to play it pick up a PS version

Good
Game play and system mechanics are overall solid, netcode in matches is mostly great (caveat coming), and it looks stunning. As a fan of fighting games these things should sell the game.

Bad
First there's no way in game to verify your frame rate. So as you are adjusting settings you are stuck relying on steam overlays and watching the game in motion for a bit to verify you are maintaining a solid 60. The fact there's no benchmark test is bewildering. Verifying all the settings is incredibly frustrating. You also have to hope that the other people you are fighting have taken the same time, as Arc System Works just lets you go online even if you are running at settings your machine can't maintain a solid 60 with. So not only do you get to deal with wifi warriors causing rollbacks, you also end up having the game spit and stutter as it keeps in motion with the other player.

Second in both versions all online functionality is embarrassingly bad. You will sit in these miserable Habo Hotel lobbies hoping to match the person who is standing on the battle pad, only to see you couldn't connect to them over and over again. When the ugly lobbies finally wear on you, you'll go to quick match where you hope you can get some training in. Only you will get a lot of training in because quick match will never match you with anyone. Also the promised wifi indicator is MIA and that's super disappointing.

Last, unsurprising, and perhaps the only one that's kind of forgivable since this is how ASW releases everything, the balancing is so bewilderingly bad in the case of Sol and Ram that I can't believe ASW shipped it out like this. Nothing has changed after 2 betas regarding these two miserable characters. It's really disappointing we have to go through the same it's super busted beginnings we always do when these ones are so obvious it's painful.

If you can stomach the matchmaking and 1.0 character balance issues, pick this up on console, until ASW either sets a benchmarking up for netplay and gates it based on that or makes frame stability the other player's problem exclusively, the PC port is just the inferior version.

Tons of locked off options including frame caps and no high res texture options. Game looks like it runs kinda okay, but after the Nvidia hype showing the imaginary ultra settings this is pretty disappointing. At this point until there are patches I'd avoid purchase.