I'm not in love with it, honestly. I really do think they did a great job making the combo system feel open and satisfying, and aesthetically I think this game shows a real mastery for what they have been trying to accomplish since Xrd moving to 3D models.
Thing is, the character special movesets are pretty shallow, the assist system is super basic with only 1 assist per character (partially due to the shallow special movesets I guess), and it is such an overwhelmingly offensive game even compared to other team-based fighters. The game's neutral is as basic as it gets and there is pretty much no consistent way to stop it from collapsing, the systems themselves seem designed to ensure it happens quickly. I don't expect that to evolve much over time either, it'll likely only become more optimized around setplay and the first brief neutral dance into who can get the first hard knockdown.
My time with it has made me feel a bit more certain that I actually prefer the duo games over trio ones in general. It's obviously possible to have way more interesting neutral / zoning game in a trio game with assists than this (see MvC2) but they are so damn hard to play at that point that those games are easier for me to appreciate watching than playing. This game has a cadence that I think is just going to feel kind of rote after a while, and I can't see this game's pretty bad surrounding structure keeping me engaged in spite of that.
I think this style of game will keep a pretty decent player base (especially compared to ASW's other games) so at a minimum I don't think it's a game where it'll die to due lack of activity or anything, and I suspect it'll still be a good time spectating at this year's EVO. Still, it feels to me like it might be a lead-in for something much better down the road, like MSHvSF was before MvC2 came to be. I'm glad this game has been a great success for ASW though, and I hope it gets them to modernize their online structure, because in that regard this game feels at least a generation behind, and that's ignoring the parts of it that still aren't working properly as of today.
