Street Fighter X Tekken is a crossover between, of course,
Street Fighter and the 3D arcade fighter
Tekken. It's a crossover I don't think anyone saw coming, but heck, everyone's getting in on the crossover fun these days. The story centers around the characters from both games pursuing a mysterious box hidden in Antarctica. The box is called Pandora, so chances are it doesn't contain world peace. Some fight to keep it out of the hands of evil, some are the evil. Nah, the story wasn't pulled from any literary masterpiece, but it's decent enough for your average fighter.
Street Fighter X Tekken continue's Capcom's trend of creating fighters that are accessible to the first time or novice fighting game player. I won't say this makes a game that plays itself. There's still a lot to learn, a whole lot of customization, and a whole lot to practice. Street Fighter X Tekken simply finds ways to put training wheels on when you need them.
One new feature to this game is the Gem system. You can add custom Gems to your fighter in order to customize your character to your preferred style of gameplay. Each Gem has a condition associated with it. For example, an Onslaught Lv. 1 Gem may require you to connect with 3 Special Moves to trigger its effect of 20% increased Cross Gauge acquisition rate. Don't like that trigger condition? You can choose another Onslaught Gem with a different trigger condition. The Special Edition DLC pack basically gives you a ton of new Gems with various conditions and effects to play around with. A lot of these DLC Gems are identical to the ones already included with the game, but the DLC Gems do not include a detrimental effect such as reduced speed. If you ask me, it requires a ridiculous level of drilling down, comparing, and sorting to really compare them all. But if you do look through them, Gems will offer you a way to build a character suited to you. Another drawback is the fact that you can't currently alter your Gem setup while choosing your characters, but this should be coming as an update down the pipeline.
It may be a small thing, but the character intros before each match are actually pretty fun. Put together a "standard" team like Bison and Yuri, and they'll have a special introduction where they have some custom lines and interaction. The Poison and Hugo team will of course start with Poison sitting on Hugo's shoulder, for example. Zangief and Rufus have an intro that I can only describe as... Power Rangers and/or Sailor Moon. It's really just awesome. Even if you don't put the correct teams together, the non-custom intros are still entertaining (A subtitled bear? Awesome).
Online play of course lets you go head-to-head with opponents on Xbox Live. The more unique feature is the co-op play option. You can play online with a friend on a co-op team. You can play with your real life, smelly (maybe) friends as well. Co-op means you don't always have to play against each other, but you can play up each other's strengths. You tag your partner in at key times to help each other win the match, or at least to prevent a lost match by getting your injured self out of there. For utter chaotic fun, you can also try a Scramble Battle. 4 players are simultaneously on the screen battling each other as teams.
Unfortunately, online play is marred by some performance issues. If you don't have a pretty decent, lag-free connection, you'll experience some jarring rollback issues (the game goes back in time a bit to make up for lag). Also, very often, you won't hear the voice or sound effects for certain moves.
