Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls Review (PS5)

From being absolutely blown away by the first trailer, to the open beta, and finally the full launch. You have no idea how long I’ve waited to play as the Samurai outriders. There’s no better absolute cinema than watching Deadpool break the fourth wall assisted by Loki, Blade and Ghost Rider. Released on August 6, 2026 for the PlayStation 5 and PC, the game debuts with 20 playable characters and a story arc that can be played with four different teams and perspectives. Just like we skip victory screens during multiplayer matches out of respect, let’s skip straight into an official Gameffine review for Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls.

Champions Day before Doomsday

The Avengers are on about as usual, making sure the Earth is free from danger by opening up parks and giving speeches, but suddenly the entire world is now threatened at once by a promoter, announcing that the Earth is now marked for destruction if the heroes cannot defeat a champion who has officially challenged Earth and its citizens. The promoter handpicked a few heroes whom she deemed capable and asked each of them to make a 4-hero roster to combat the Champion.

Enter – Fighting Avengers, Unbreakable X-Men, The Amazing Guardians, Samurai Outriders (best), and Knights of Doom.

Each story starts with the team leader of each team collecting, rather than choosing, the other three members of their team. In a strange constant throughout the story, Thor seems to be missing from the picture entirely. The Avengers end up being built of Captain America, Black Panther, Hulk and Iron Man. Similarly, the X-Men go in with a new character called Danger, led by Storm along with Wolverine and Magik.

While Doom and co. get to make their own super villain roster, my eyes were locked in on Samurai Outriders, who also seem to have the best story arc amongst all five episodes.

Samurai Outriders starts with Ghost Rider, who actually chose not to participate, and thus ended up getting his brother kidnapped by the promoter and forced himself into the tournament. His demon car takes up the duty of finding the other members, and automatically chooses Loki, Deadpool, and Blade. Making up one of the most outrageously rebellious and gnarly rosters of all time.

Progressing into the story, they end up defeating the other rosters and finally take on the champion themselves and win.

For the story, it’s a good spin around and a common take on defeating the one true enemy in a fighter format. The Fighting Avengers story arc is the only one you may find the most boring or poorly crafted among all other stories.

Instant Fun, Non-stop moves

Marvel Tokon is surprisingly easy to pick up and great to master. Right from the get-go, you aren’t swarmed with sweats doing range combos and parries like their unemployement depends on it, but rather people trying to figure the right balance between combos and finishers through a tag of four heroes you’ve decided to bring with. The link moves work well, the assemble finisher is amazing, and the individual move sets are a joy to explore for each character. P.S: For all the Hulk mains spamming the charged tackle and ground slams, you have a separate place in hell.

Do you miss the days when suddenly a very chill-looking uncle would visit your gaming cafe and ask if you’d like to take him on a Tekken match, and you’d spend the rest of the day being juggled mid-air for all of your matches? Yeah, you don’t need to worry as much, because the game feels closer to SF6 in terms of move sets and combos than Tekken’s masterclass of spamming a 50-hit combo. Tokon wants you to focus more on crossovers (parries), counters and punishing, which constantly makes the game an exciting mental game of exploiting the enemy for an opening.

All characters are defined in their own separate classes as per the range of attacks they excel at, but larger characters like the Hulk or Carnage have an entirely different way of combat that is both fun and challenging to figure out depending on the type of the enemy. Characters like Storm are much deeper in terms of the move set and skills that need to work in harmony to actually excel with the character. On the other hand, characters like Danger and Iron Man are easier to wreak havoc with simply by focusing on the move sets and combos that are hard to counter in fast-paced combat.

The main story lets you have a go with each character once, but going into the guides of each character and taking the lessons is absolutely rewarding and fun to explore. You may also find some unlisted move sets in the command list for your favourite heroes.

What the game struggles with is definitely the player count, especially in SEA. While the US and Europe open lobbies are constantly filled, the SEA servers are limited and often do not have other people trying to find random matches. It’s fairly easy to find casual matches, but the fun in open lobby is going to be hollow if you don’t bring in your friends.

The game also comes with a serious glitch that I’ve only faced in Tokon: despite being in India, servers closer to me are marked as just 1 network bar, despite having 30-50ms ping with opponents in a casual match. But faraway servers like the US and Europe are shown as full network bars. I’ve waited over a week for this to get fixed, but it seems this might remain unresolved until the next DLC. As a PS+ subscriber, this is even more frustrating to deal with and makes less sense to have a subscription when the online service of the game doesn’t even work well. For other games like Halo Campaign Evolved, F1 25, Fortnite or even COD, I face no issues with the ping.

The Best UI Ever. Period.

Marvel Tokon’s art style is the peak and benchmark of gaming in 2026. Simply paying tribute to the comics by having an artsy comic strip-style canvas approach of the whole UI, while having the characters in a full 3D 60FPS design, is a remarkable decision that makes me want to play the game more and more. Tokon has limited but great map designs with multiple parts that you can visit back and forth by slamming your enemy across the map. The transition is straight out of early Naruto Ultimate Ninja games, and I am all in for it. Link moves are extremely well executed and programmed even more neatly to register moves and act as a proper hitbox; you have no idea how many times I’ve used Dr Doom as a bait to wrap around the enemy for a combo.

The main menu screen itself can change if you pick a different roster as your main pick in an online match. Having Deadpool in my main screen makes it so much better and more personalised. Open lobbies are an adorable execution and a good standard compared to other leading fighter games. Having a concept of Marvel ideas has the entire arena filled with easter eggs and heroes in multiple sections, and just normally hanging out in a filled lobby is full of fun things to do.

Final Word

Marvel Tokon is a brilliantly executed tag team fighter that just works perfectly for newcomers and veterans alike. Each character comes with a fighting style group and a unique set of abilities, making each fight a fresh situation to tackle. The art style does great justice to the universe, along with voice-overs that do much better in the Japanese version. The matchmaking is quite good in terms of skills, but it’s hard to find players, possibly because of the network bug or maybe a low player count. Overall, the PS Store price of 3,999 is definitely better than the launch price of Tekken 8 at 4,799 for the disc edition.