Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls Review: A Spectacular Fighter That Thrives on Chaos

I have always enjoyed fighting games, but I wouldn't call myself someone who lives and breathes them. I have spent plenty of time with Tekken, Street Fighter, and Mortal Kombat over the years, but these days, I mostly fire up a fighting game when friends come over, and we want something we can jump into, throw a few punches, and have a good time without taking things too seriously.

That's probably why Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls clicked with me so quickly.

I have spent more than 10 hours playing it on the PS5, jumping between Episode Mode and fighting a friend online, and it's been genuinely fun from the start. The controls are easy enough to pick up, the 4v4 battles are wonderfully chaotic, and you don't need to spend hours learning complicated combos before you can start pulling off moves that look spectacular on screen.

Of course, putting Marvel characters in the middle of all this certainly helps. I am a decent Marvel fan, although most of my knowledge comes from the movies rather than the comics. So, while Spider-Man, Iron Man, Captain America, Wolverine, Hulk, and Black Panther immediately felt familiar, Tokon also introduced me to characters and parts of the Marvel universe I knew very little about.

And that's something I didn't expect going in. Tokon isn't simply a fighting game with a Marvel skin slapped on top. There's a surprising amount of attention given to the characters, their histories, and the different corners of the Marvel universe they come from.

But all of that would mean very little if throwing a punch wasn't any fun. Thankfully, that's where Tokon is at its best.

Learning to Fight Doesn't Feel Like Homework

One thing that immediately worked for me was how approachable Tōkon feels.

The game starts by walking you through its controls and some of the things you can do during a fight. If you've played fighting games before, none of this takes particularly long to understand. Light attacks, heavier hits, character-specific abilities, and combos all started falling into place fairly quickly.

I'm certainly not going to pretend I was pulling off every combination perfectly after ten minutes. There was still plenty of enthusiastic button smashing involved. The nice part is that even that can produce something that looks ridiculously cool.

That's important because fighting games can sometimes feel like they expect you to study for an exam before you're allowed to enjoy them. Tōkon has plenty underneath the surface if you want to get serious, but it doesn't make you learn everything immediately.

Then comes the part that initially sounds slightly intimidating: this is a 4v4 fighting game.

You pick four characters for your team, although you aren't controlling four people simultaneously like some superhero version of an RTS. One fighter is doing the actual fighting while the others gradually become available to assist or swap into battle.

If you spent your childhood playing WWE SmackDown! Here Comes the Pain as I did, think of the basic idea as a much, much faster tag-team match. One person takes the punches while the others wait to make their entrance. Except here, Iron Man can fly in and shoot someone. Slight upgrade.

Picking Four Heroes Is Half the Fun

I spent a lot of my time with Wolverine, Iron Man, Captain America, and Hulk. Was there some grand tactical thinking behind this combination? Initially, absolutely not. I just like those characters.

But Tokon eventually gets you thinking about why you have picked them.

Every fighter feels different enough that swapping characters actually matters and is super fun). Wolverine and Captain America worked particularly well for me when I wanted to get close and aggressive. Iron Man, on the other hand, gave me more room to attack from a distance. Spider-Man can similarly be incredibly useful when you don't necessarily want to spend the entire fight standing nose-to-nose with your opponent.

The more I played, the more I started changing the team just to see what combinations worked. You can also call another character in for a quick assist without completely handing over the fight. There were plenty of moments when I was busy attacking with Wolverine, called Iron Man in, watched him knock the opponent around, and then carried on with what I was doing. It sounds like there should be a lot to manage here, but the game makes it surprisingly easy to understand.

My first instinct with a tag-team fighter would normally be to swap out a character who's getting absolutely destroyed and bring in someone healthier. That's not happening here. If Wolverine has spent the last minute getting punched into another postcode, switching to Captain America isn't magically going to undo the damage. Everyone is in this mess together.

That means switching is less about protecting someone's health and much more about picking the right powers for whatever is happening in front of you. I actually like this approach because it removes one more thing I have to constantly keep track of while still giving me a reason to use the rest of the team. And trust me, there is already enough to keep track of.

Sometimes, I Had No Idea What Was Happening

Four-character teams sound great until the screen decides to remind you that there are, indeed, four characters on each team. Tōkon can become chaotic very quickly.

You're throwing punches, an assist jumps in, someone fires something across the screen, another character appears for half a second, the stage is exploding with effects, and suddenly your opponent is flying through a wall.

There were moments when I genuinely had to look at the nameplate at the top of the screen to remind myself who I was controlling.

The game does try to make this obvious, but there is only so much a nameplate can do when Iron Man is flying around and Wolverine is busy doing Wolverine things. Strangely, though, this chaos is also responsible for some of my favourite moments.

If you land certain combo attacks, you can send your opponent crashing into another part of the stage, with the fight continuing in the new location. It makes the arenas feel like more than colourful backgrounds sitting behind two people punching each other.

And then there's Tōkon Assemble. This is easily one of my favourite things in the game. Pulling it off means your entire team comes together to take turns beating down the opponent in one big cinematic attack.

The animations are fast, wonderfully over-the-top and exactly the sort of thing you'd expect from four superheroes deciding that one person needs to have a particularly bad day.

The DualSense helps sell all of this, too. The controller is put to good use during combat, particularly when you're landing heavier attacks and combos. A good kick doesn't just look powerful on the TV; there's enough feedback through the controller to give it some extra weight in your hands.

The comic-book charm eventually wears thin

As much as I liked the comic-book presentation initially, I also discovered that it works much better in smaller doses.

During the first few hours, I was actually paying attention to everything. The artwork looks great, the sound effects add some life to otherwise static panels, and I liked seeing how the game tied different characters and their histories together. For someone like me who knows Marvel mostly through the movies, there was also quite a bit here that was new to me.

But somewhere around the latter half of the Marvel story in Chapter 1, my patience started running out.

A fight would end, another set of comic panels would appear, and instead of wondering what was going to happen next, I found myself wondering how long it would be before I could fight again. That's usually not a great sign.

I eventually started skipping through some of these sections, which is a shame because the problem isn't that they're poorly made. If anything, it's quite the opposite. There's clearly a lot of attention paid to the artwork, dialogue, sound effects, and Marvel lore. I just think the game leans on this style of storytelling a little too heavily, and what initially felt fresh eventually started feeling like something I had to get through before the next match. Perhaps someone who has grown up reading Marvel comics will have considerably more patience for it than I did.

Verdict

Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls is an easy recommendation for anyone who enjoys fighting games, and an even easier one if Marvel is already your thing. What I appreciate most is that it never makes you work too hard to start having fun. You can take the time to learn every character and perfect your timing, or simply call a friend, pick four superheroes you like, and start throwing punches.

I'm much closer to the latter, and even after more than 10 hours, I'm nowhere close to being done with it. There are still characters I want to spend more time with, teams I haven't tried, and, more importantly, friends I haven't challenged yet.

For me, that's exactly what a good fighting game should do. It shouldn't make me feel like I've seen everything after finishing the story. It should make me want to pick up the controller and ask, “One more?” And, Tokon does exactly that.

Rating:

4.5/5

Pros: