Capcom has recently been making a huge resurgence into the fighting game market. It began with the successful relaunching of the Street Fighter series with Street Fighter IV, and Super Street Fighter IV. Then in March they released the popular Marvel vs. Capcom 3. With the upcoming release of Street Fighter X Tekken, Capcom plans to strike gold once more, and I was able to get my hands on an early demo of the game.

The roster for a fighting game can determine it's success or failure. For our demonstration, we were able to choose from Ryu, Ken, Chun Li, Guile, Abel, Cammy, and Sagat on the Capcom side, and Kazuya, Nina, Bob, King, Craig, Julia, and Hwoarang from the Tekken side. I'll pray that Akuma will be added to the list by the time the game is released in 2012.

Super Street Fighter IV won many critics and fans over for it's perfect character balancing. I'm happy to report that the same perfect balancing will return for this game. Tekken characters felt right at home with the Street Fighter characters, and there was no character that had an unfair advantage. How a character performed was reliant completely on the player's skill level.

Fighting game fans who enjoy Tekken more than Street Fighter may be disappointed to hear that a lot of elements in the game lean more towards Super Street Fighter IV, than the latest Tekken entry. The most noticeable similar element being the graphics. The visuals of the game are close to the colorful, vibrant, three-dimensional graphics of Street Fighter IV, but pushes the stylized graphics even more, and almost into cartoon color territory.

The game features a heavy tag team component, incorporating a good number of the character's moves with tag team combos. Even though it's a tag team fight, the opponent only has to kill one of your team members to win. However, the problem with only requiring one member to die in order to win is that the match will soon become a game of whoever can switch their partners fast enough, instead of being about fighting to the best of your abilities until the end. It defeats the purpose of having a tag team system in a fighting game, and I hope there is an option to turn it off when the game is released.

The controls are similar to Super Street Fighter IV, and seemed as if they were even simplified. Getting combos off were easier than they have ever been in a Street Fighter game. Most of the actual combos involved using your partner for a tag team move. This ended up getting annoying very fast. It made it hard to keep a partner with low life out of the game so they wouldn't die, and, as a result of the game only requiring one team member to fall in order for your opponent to win, keeping a team member near death sheltered is key to winning a match.

Regardless of the annoyances that I'm sure a Street Fighter pro could easily learn to adapt, Street Fighter X Tekken, is still a very solid fighting game that is hard to put down, even when you are getting your butt kicked.