rmaddi

Okay, let's do this: from the start, Fighting EX Layer is not for everyone. Do you like old style arcade-fighting games? You will love Fighting EX Layer. Misses the gameplay and (non-SF) characters from Street Fighter EX series? Fighting EX Layer is perfect for you. Anybody els may get mixed feelings from this game, it's as simple as that. Gameplay wise, it works wonders, exactly what a fan would expect from a 20 reboot of sorts of the series. Even though there are few characters at the moment (13 and a possibility for more depending on how well the game sells), all of them have their own personality and playstyles so it never feels stale playing Fighting EX Layer. As a whole, there should be nothing but praise for Arika for been able to even putting this out. With a very reduced team working solely out of passion, the games feels incredible, with arguably even better gameplay than some of the bigger names on the FGC scene, but theres a big drawback: as it stands now, theres pretty much no single player content present on the game. Even though the game is in an early access state of sorts as it is in launch and the team responsible for it have promised an important announcement of sorts at EVO 2018 (probably regarding an arcade mode in a future patch), the game pretty much stands on it's online matches. (if you're really itching for single player action, though, there's an option at the training mode called Kumite where you can play a Survival Mode against the AI, and it's pretty fun!). Again, it's quite impressive the game being as it is on launch (no connection problems even with players from all around the world). Before someone makes the comparison, it's completely unfair to put this side to side with SF V on launch taking in consideration both the size of the company and teams related to both projects. All in all, this is a great fighting game that depends only on bringing in the abandoned EX scene and some new players who never got the chance on playing the old games to get into stellar proportions. If you have the 40 dollars to spend, I highly recommend to buy the light version of the game, both to try it out and see if it fits you and to support Arika's newest passion project.

So, in it's core, BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle is a great fighting game. The mechanics are solid, working for both a newcomer who knows nothing of fighting games in general - let alone anime fighting games - and a veteran with years of other blazBlue and Guilty Gear titles on their belt. That being said, the lack of content (principally the DLC characters that technically are in the game, as some of them appear in the game already, in the story mode) is quite apaling, principally coming from Arc Systems. Only Story, Survival and Versus Modes on single player available, if you're not into online gaming, you can keep this one down as it's appeal will dwindle quite easily on you. Another "problem" is it's roster; even though as it is of today it's already really diverse and there is lot's of fun and good or wacky combinations to be made, to have half of the roster to come on the base game and most of the rest as paid DLC feels like a cheap way to make money over the player. The meat of the game comes from online play. The lobbies where all quick and (mostly) lag free, at least for the first day. After around 50 matches on both casual and ranked lobbies, there were only two of them where lag was really existant (and still neither of them it was an issue that changed the outcome of the match). In summary, if we look only at it's fighting mechanics, BlazBlue Cross Tag Battle excels beautifully, bringing a lot of ways to play at a frantic pace; but as a whole, it leaves some to be desired. If you're really into any of the franchises, it's pretty much worth the purchase. If you're only partly interested, think some more before buying this one or you might regret it.