MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls

This is a less than stellar PC launch. The game itself might be very good for all I know, but there are lots of technical issues and weird technical choices (the latter of which are almost definitely Sony's doing) that make the experience much worse than it should be. For starters: I'd play this game on my Ryzen 5 7600X3D, Radeon 9070 XT, 32 GB RAM Linux PC but I simply can't. Whoever ported this game did not enable Linux support for Easy Anti-Cheat (I'll get back to this), and it's uncertain it would run well even with it because of the PlayStation SDK and overlay. So instead, I had to play on my aging, PS5-grade Windows 10 PC with the venerable Ryzen 5 3600 and RTX 3060 12 GB plus 16 GB of RAM, but it sucks that I had to do this at all. [b]I'm not asking for a full-blown Linux version of the game, I'm just asking for it to be playable through Proton.[/b] That's one strike already. Let's talk about the anti-cheat, too. This is a fighting game, and such games are largely deterministic. You send and receive inputs, both ends are kept in sync by the netcode and a (hopefully) steady framerate [spoiler]I love foreshadowing[/spoiler] so things happen the same way on both screens unless you have a major desync like the game believing you're using a different character. There's very little you can do to actually cheat in a fighting game: selecting boss/unreleased characters, faking high-scores and match data, with the absolute worst-case scenario being reading the game's state and running scripts to exploit it. The first two cases can be avoided by checking and sanitising data to ensure that what the game received is actually possible. The last one is a bit trickier and boils down to playing against a bot or someone with macros, and if you can prove their execution is "too perfect" (consistently frame-perfect, below human reaction times, no misinputs), you can simply block them. Well actually no, you can do that regardless and many people will block random players they don't want to fight. Anyway, such cheaters would never stand a chance in an actual offline setting, let alone a tournament, because it would be impossible for them to cheat to that extent: even assuming they try using hardware macros, it would be very noticeable when their physical inputs don't line up with the in-game sequence of inputs. Long story short, [b]cheaters are a non-issue yet here we are with a kernel-level anti-cheat solution (i.e. invasive)[/b]. It's also worth noting that almost no fighting games have such an anti-cheat (off the top of my head: Dragon Ball FighterZ and Tekken 8 because of Bandai Namco, and Virtua Fighter 5 REVO because Sega apparently thought it would be a good idea), yet cheaters are few on virtually any fighting game and easy to avoid. And yes, enabling a kernel-level anti-cheat solution to work on Linux would technically make it "less secure" due to it running in user space. I'm spooked. Plenty of games allow that, including competitive multiplayer ones like Marvel Rivals... Surely that should tell you something? Second strike. Next up, the PlayStation Network requirement and its corresponding SDK. You'll be greeted by a login popup to connect to the PSN on the title screen; you can close it and still access the game's offline features, so there's at least that. But then you dig into it and notice that the game is using Epic Online Services... You know, the thing games use for cross-platform play? Meaning that somehow, this game uses EOS [i]and[/i] has a strong dependency on PSN features. Put another way: [b]the PSN login is only a requirement because Sony made it to be[/b]. Countless other games have frictionless cross-platform play with PS5 and Epic Games Store, like a certain Guilty Gear Strive or another Granblue Fantasy Versus Rising. I could list at least three ways the devs could circumvent the issue and possibly sell the game in even more regions (don't forget that the PSN is not available in every country) but that's besides the point, just rework it to use EOS and Steam-native APIs already instead of trying to force your ecosystem upon PC players. [strike]Street Fighter III:[/strike] Third Strike. Normally that's where I should be out, but it doesn't stop there. Okay but what about the actual game? Well, I can't say much about its gameplay, but I can say that it runs poorly regardless of settings and even when neither the CPU or the GPU are being maxed out (or a single CPU thread for that matter). In training mode, on the New York stage, my framerate always hovers between 57-59 fps with very rare blips reaching 60 fps. The game seems very CPU-limited with usage usually sitting between something like 65-70% with occasional single-core spikes over 90%, while the GPU can sit between 50-70% with spikes up to 84% depending on the graphics settings I used. Also, I noticed additional framerate drops akin to stutters compared to the Open Beta, noticeable just by moving around with nothing actually happening. That was despite upgrading my GPU's drivers (that were severely out-of-date when I played the Beta) and going through the shader warm-up step first thing into the game. Never a good look. [b]If you know anything about fighting games, a locked 60 fps is pretty much mandatory yet that's not the case here.[/b] And before you say that my rig is the issue because it's technically under the minimum specs: people with much stronger CPUs are having the exact same issue, and my Windows PC is once again within PS5 performance ballpark. Another strike. Back when the Beta was live, I wondered whether that sub-60 performance was due to the framerate limiter being broken, the game being CPU-limited because the engine itself is very dependent on single-threaded performance, or because of bloatware. I quickly discarded the latter because the PSN SDK was not running in the background for me as I was playing offline, but there's still a chance EAC is still taking its toll in combination with the other aspects, overall hammering the CPU and tanking performance even on the best PCs out there. A quick note on online lobbies: while I haven't tried playing online due to my worrisome offline framerate and CPU/GPU usage plus reports of the game spawning several instances of the PlayStation SDK when playing online (being a CPU hog in addition to rollback requiring more CPU horsepower than offline play), I've quickly checked online lobbies out. Framerate was abysmal, but at least they fixed the shadow cascades' draw distance in that you no longer see shadows appearing or disappearing about 10 meters in front of you. And then there's three other points I have to rant about. What do you mean we have to pay 10€ more than the old flawed USD -> EUR conversion in Europe?! Sony already pulled that trick on PS5 for no reason by pricing PS5 games at 70$ and 80€, now they're shafting us PC players too since Death Stranding 2. Not like they've released a lot of ports since then or are planning to... And what do you mean the pre-order bonuses are not "just" a DLC and have to be redeemed in-game before a year after launch has passed?! I can see the DLC in my library, there's absolutely no good reason it should not behave as one. If anything, this sounds like another unnecessary dependency on PSN account linking. Oh and controller vibration is far too aggressive. Trust me, you're better off setting it to 2 or turning it off entirely. I don't usually mind rumble but this is way, way too much to the point it rumbled almost all the time in the few story mode chapters I played during the Beta. My 110 Eurodollars are on the table Sony. If you want to keep them, [b]you have to do better than this sad excuse for a PC version[/b]. If you don't, I'll likely happily refund and not look back until you actually fix performance, the unneeded PSN requirement (and anti-cheat too please tyvm), and Linux compatibility. And I'm certainly not the only one on the fence as you can tell by now.

Fix the performance. This game looks amazing, let us look at it. At the very least include a framerate benchmark and show it in the matchmaking menu like you do internet connection. Doesn't matter how good the game is when it is rendered unplayable at times. This is a $70 game. This game cost more than Elden Ring. Elden Ring runs on a steam deck and looks stunning. Also fix the proton port.

had potential to be great, but sony made it the biggest piece of ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ on PC.

It's a fun game when it can open, but when I want to play offline Arcade mode and Easy Anti Cheat refuses to initialize I can't recommend it

I can't recommend the PC port and echo what the masses are saying. Sony DRM & Anti-cheat completely ruining the game, while the pirated version has no issues.

Не очень понимаю претензий в отзывах. Игра отлично работает на максималках в нативе, ни одной просадки за 3 часа игры. EAC запустился без проблем, к серверам из РФ подключает с обычным запретом, играли в лобби с друзьями никаких фризов и рассинхронов. Что по самой игре очень понравился ростер персонажей, максимально разнообразный, что по самим героям, что по их скилсетам. Каждый найдёт что-то интересное для себя. По сложности очень круто построена игра, что за счёт автокомбо даже полный новичок сможет иногда выдавать крутые моменты со старта, но при этом есть огромный пласт того, как можно расти над собой. Для меня Токон стал супер крутым первым таг-тим файтингом

really excellent game unfortunately bogged down by sony making bad decisions again