Recent reviews by Fluke.LKZ

Now, more than ever, with years of fine-tuning and balancing, there's no better time to play this. With new characters being developed and constant flux of new players through sales, can't go wrong with having this game in your library if you want a fast-paced fighting game. The TL;DR of pros and cons is written in Bold.

Pros:
+ Visually, the game goes the extra mile in looks. The sprites are gorgeous, colorful and animate nicely, something quite special considering their size, and the backgrounds are also fantastic to look at!
+ The soundtrack is packed full of great memorable music. Definitely a case of an Album with a Free Game as Bonus.
+ Stringing the most basic combos together is easy as it can get. (Light, medium, heavy, special, super), so if you're in the heat of the moment and brain-to-hand coordination is not helping, just stick to the mentioned basic sequence and you can get a solid amount of damage going, specially if you're playing a solo character against a trio.
+ It packs a neat tutorial. For the time it came out, its tutorial offers a lot of content for those who like learning by reading and doing drills, and to this day is still a very useful asset for those who want to learn a general view of fighting games.
+ A versatile fighting system. While Skullgirls' gameplay is very much inspired by Marvel vs Capcom series of tag fighters, it uses the team ratio system ala Capcom vs SNK. That creates a system where you can have a solo character who does more damage and carries more health, or you can also have a duo/trio if you want to use assists to extend combos or maintain the neutral, at the cost of health and damage.
+ Playing online feels really nice! Using GGPO, online play against people from further distances than your own country (such as whole seas of distance) becomes bearable enough at least, and if both players are on the same country it's a guaranteed smooth experience (as long as no one is using wi-fi).

Cons:
- The tutorial could use some fine-tuning. While the tutorial is robust, teaching you basic and advanced concepts, its presentation definitely aged, coming from a game made in 2012, with the way it throws you around lesson after lesson, a matter of needing more polish for today's standards of user experience. An ideal way to tackle it, that the game doesn't tell you explicitly, is to go for the first row of basic lessons, maybe take a look at the basic tutorial of a character that you like, play some matches to get your bearings and then only go for the intermediate and advanced "courses" when you feel the need to sink into the deeper aspects. Trying to do the whole thing in one go is an exercise in futility, unless you're a big-brained gamer who retains a lot of information with ease.
- Assist-based fighting games aren't for everyone. While the fighting system offers a variety of Solo and Team matchups, the fact that it's a fighting game with assists can make the screen become an information overflow for new players.
- The lobby system is still prone to some jank. It's nothing unbearable but it might need to be re-opened sometimes between matches, specially if you make a lobby with more than three players, gladly it's fast and easy to do so it's not that big of a deal.

Pro or Con, determined by personal tastes:
/ Its artstyle can be a hit or miss. Visually or stylistically, the characters aren't regular martial artists ala Street Fighter or Virtua Fighter, neither modern cool people like King of Fighters, nor anime-inspired like Guilty Gear and Blazblue. It goes for its own visual idea combining dark deco and western animation that isn't seen usually in a fighting game, or any other game for that matter. There is a bit of flavor of anime in how some characters look, move and animate, and specially the references in alternate colors and moves, but the game's not focused on those. That can be an amazing refreshing take on the genre or it may look like something that's hard to enjoy.

/ Online play is like a swimming pool with sharks, which can offer a good challenge or heinous frustration. Due to it being an older title and a smaller game (in terms of popularity) in an already niche genre of competitive games, its online population should offer a more experienced bulk of challengers. Sure that's true to most competitive games who are old enough to grow a faithful audience, even with the constant sales help bring new blood and the plentiful number of communities willing to accomodate new players. To a lot of people, this can offer a lot of frustration as you go in lobbies or Quick Play and stumble against stronger opponents, who assume they're not playing with new players, which can lead to a stomp. Those who aren't willing to find a public group/forum/Discord server or don't have (almost) equally skilled friend(s) to run sets with, or aren't feeling sociable enough to talk with the players they find, that can be a dealbreaker. The more "trial by fire" sort of player, who prefers fighting these stronger opponents so they can learn through hardship, this is great and ideal, if not perfect! BIG TIP: NEW PLAYERS WHO WANT A MORE "RELAXED" EXPERIENCE ONLINE SHOULD GO FOR LOBBIES, QUICK PLAY IS KIND OF LIKE RANKED SO PEOPLE THERE FIGHT FOR KEEPS. IF YOU LIKE LEARNING THROUGH PAIN, THEN GO FOR IT.

/ The single player experience has enough options, but could use more. To some players this is a complete non-issue since they barely touch that part of fighting games, but for those who do it can leave some aspects to be desired. Examples: The story mode is good enough, it uses the old arcade style of storytelling, where one character's "campaign" can connect with others, while another character's offers a whole different ending or completely disregard the plot, and now that some characters are added that offer a more "canon" version of events, you can get a whole story on your plate from start to finish; Arcade Mode is what you already know; Trials offer an interesting challenge with character-specific combos to perform, some being useful enough in real matches while others are intended to be a puzzle to solve; Marie 300% is an absolute ordeal of patience and resillience if you're masochistic enough. The lack of other modes that were a granted in other console fighting games, such as Time Attack and Survival, is a shame as well.

In conclusion, Skullgirls good.

Mark of the Ninja is one of the best 2D side-scrolling stealth games you can find. Its animated cutscenes display quite a simplistic straight-forward plot, but it's solid enough to keep you going as the game throws you new mechanics through the levels. May be considered a bit too short on a first playthrough, but the new game plus and higher difficulty settings may provide the extra bit of challenge to those who want to enhance the feeling of sneaking through enemies.