Marvel: Tokon Fighting Souls: PS5 Review

Developer: Arc System Works
Published by Sony Interactive
Platform: PS5

The Marvel vs Capcom games have forever left a mark on the fighting genre.

But a new 2026 contender has emerged to ensure that brawling is as much fun as you'd remember from either your Street Fighter days or hanging back at the arcades trying to get one over on your mates.

However, the twist with Marvel: Tokon Fighting Souls is that the game has taken a deep roster of Marvel superheroes, patched a relatively rough story behind the combat and beatdowns and delivered a 4v4 combat experience, rather than the traditional 3v3 tag team-ups that you'd get from prior games.

As a result, Marvel: Tokon Fighting Souls delivers perhaps one of the most entertaining and colourful beat-em-ups, albeit one that has a story mode that seems to go on forever, keeping you away from the fighting.

A visually energetic spectacle in many ways, what impresses with Fighting Souls is how crystal clear its graphics are, how crisp the action is and how satisfying the beatdowns can be. There's an air of clarity here which makes the fighting easy to adapt to and welcoming to anyone, regardless of whether they've played the genre before.

With some 20 Marvel characters (though no sign of the X-Men yet), there's plenty of fan favourites to squad up with. Whether it's Spider-Man, Iron Man or Carnage, the Marvel roster is well represented in action that's satisfying to execute.

Granted, there's an element of button mashing in parts and some of the game requires you to think about strategy as you tag in and out of various combinations, but largely Marvel: Tokon Fighting Souls is more interested in anyone come and pick up the controller before getting involved.

With offline modes and online battles to explore, there's plenty of content for brawlers to dive into - and the game does more than enough to engage players with whatever they want to play. There's a depth that Arc System Works have brought to the game and it's more than enough to satiate both the rabid Marvel fans and the casual players alike.

The only real time the game starts to drag for casual users in during the Story Mode which deploys the flipbook comic panels to strong effect as it tells the story, but slows the pace as you have to go through endless pages of dialogue and reveals before getting to any of the real action within.

It's also worth highlighting that the game never looks cluttered when it delivers its action, no matter how many characters are on the screen and how brutal the fights get. Sometimes with some of the coin-op games, these kinds of titles can end up feeling like they're over-stuffed graphically, and while Fighting Souls pushes its 4v4 teamplay, there's never any real sign that the game's struggling on the hardware front.

With unique gameplay to each character (for example, Captain America can use his shield offensively and defensively), Arc System Works has taken time and care to ensure nothing feels like a cut and paste mechanic lazily deployed to every fighter. Consequently, it means players will want to have their own favourites and can deliver their own level of gameplay to each character they use.

It remains to be seen what future characters will be used in any planned DLC, but for now, given its smooth execution and its simple playability, Marvel: Tokon Fighting Souls feels like the perfect way to wile away those gaming sessions.