Nathan Trubiano

I’ve played the original strikers game an immense amount and I love the game. This new game unfortunately takes a lot of the good of the original and brings it down. Pros: Chaotic fun. With 4 players on one team this game can be really fun and hectic. The stats are an interesting addition and can change game play slightly. Clubs are a great idea. Cons: unfortunately Nintendo likes to make pvp games where they want to lower the skill gap, which they did by making items way more random and not based on gameplay. They also made shooting far easier which can lead to infuriating goals. No matter how far ahead you are, there’s almost always a way for the other team to catch up. The stats are fine but other than strength and speed, the rest don’t seem to affect gameplay much. And getting rid of super strikes for hyper strikes takes away a lot from the game. Items also miss a lot and the aiming system is a big downgrade. Overall it’s a fun game but it’s clearly made for multiplayer and trying to play this game alone puts you at an instant disadvantage for the only part of the game which may be worth the money, pvp. So if you have 4 dedicated friends this will be a lot of fun, if not, it will probably be lackluster and frustrating. Edit: After playing this game more I have found that it is essentially unplayable alone. You will always lose to teams with more than one person. The new item system and inconsistent goalie AI make the experience always frustrating even when you win. They have eliminated the skill gap with easy goals and random item awards. The game is clearly designed to make the team that is losing score more and catch up. If you want to play a game with any logic to it at all, don’t bother with this. It’s so chaotic there’s no rhyme or reason to any of the gameplay.

Positives: Lots of characters, fun gameplay like the other games, some customization with Outfits and gear, and co-op online is a great upgrade. Negatives: Way less customization with abilities. All characters only have 4 to choose from. You cannot level up characters easily in the story that are not in your team of four. You need to pick a group and stick with them or use only new characters you get, which takes away a lot of the fun and reason for having all the characters. Also all the characters feel similar. They share move types and often this means the same move just looks different. Gear is only semi-customizable and often only has one upgrade per item. Biggest issue is of course the camera angles. They ruin most boss fights and some random encounters along the way. Also button combos are gone and you have almost no reason to use heavy attacks. Overall the game is fun but honestly you get a little bored after about 5 hours. I give it a 5/10. Boss fights are challenging which is good but some are due to the camera angle which is not good. Also the challenges you find along the way are fun side missions but they offer you very little support until you can fully master them which defeats the usual purpose which is using them to build bench character levels. I found myself grinding levels which ask me to defeat a certain number of enemies just to level up a little bit and even then it wasn’t enough to keep up with the story. It’s fun with others but loses its luster if you are playing a lone. I agree with the others who have said wait until it comes out on sale.