Some thoughts after playing.
First the game feels a good bit better than the first public beta I played previously. That beta felt somewhat stiff to me while the full game felt easier to maneuver, if that makes sense. Though I find that the inputs for doing specials and supers are a little less forgiving than other modern fighting games.
For matchmaking it can be a long wait for a match. I ended changing all the search parameters to 'Any' except for connection which I dropped to 4 bars. Even with that there were times I was waiting 15 minutes or more for a match. I suspect the issue is a combination of my location and the number of people who bought the game. Hopefully more people will buy the game and this will improve. Of the matches that I did get, only one of them lagged badly, the rest were pretty good.
One thing that is concerning is the lack of single player modes. All there is is Expert mode (combo trials) and a Kumite mode that is accessed through the practice mode. The trials are pretty much what you would expect, though I find them harder than the combo trials of other games. The Kumite mode is basically a survival mode. It's unfortunate that they didn't include a 1P vs CPU mode or any kind of arcade mode. I know they were on a tight budget, but if you have the AI for the Kumite and Training modes, I don't see how hard it would be to slap together 8 random fights together to make an Arcade or Time Attack mode. Sure it wouldn't have endings but it would still be fun for those of us who enjoy just chilling out and playing the CPU. I'm hoping this is something Arika will be able to add soonish, but I worry that the lack of these core single player modes will cause people to not buy it, like with what happened with SFV's launch, which will reduce the amount of funds Arika will have to make any kinds of improvements to the game.
