Dont expect a good single player experience, the rest of the game is still strong.
If you like fighters but dont have people to play against and need a good single player experience this game is worthless. Don't expect anything awesome like in SC3. Story mode consists of 5 battles, 1 cutscene, and 1 stupid line of text after you win. And 2-3 of those battles are against multiple opponents.
The tower mode looked cool...(I only went up, forgot to try going down), By clearing a certain number of floors it looked like you would get treasure which is clothing for the character creator which should have been really cool and really motivating....but then they screw it up beyond belief and make a tedious difficult fight for every piece of treasure. You have to do things like clear the multiple fights on the multiple floors without getting injured, use a specific attack, switch out with a party member and god knows what else.
I just can not see the point of doing that crap and then getting something incredibly stupid as your reward like an ugly pair of pants. There is probably a lot of really killer items to find and use but I don't even want to think about what it would take to get them. It was just another slap in the face to single player. Unless your a hardcore fighter fan and think of this crap as training.
Besides a crappy single player experience my only other complaint is something most people wouldfind stupid. After I KO people I always thought it was great fun how the game let you continue to beat on them for a second or two afterwards starting way back in Soul BLADE. In SC4 you can still beat on people but time you have to grapple somebody who is stumbling around from being KO'ed is incredibly short. It can still be done but it has to be done immdeately after the knockout when the person is standing the most upright. That was my favorite way of finishing off people, run up to them and perform a grapple.
Ok I guess I have another issue. I feel like they over complicated the game by adding in this Soul Guage mechanic. Basically as you hit and block a guage fills up. You are then able to use the guage to activate skills or some crap and perform some kinda super attack. I had the button to activate the soul guage set but I never got it to do anything and it was just not a good addition. They also let you switch out with other characters depending on the battle. This all results in removing 2 buttons from your controller for presets. One if you dont care about switching. It was perfect before sc4. two shoulder buttons for grabs, one for those flaming soul attacks, and one for the other type of special attack
Its not all bad. The fighting mechanics still crush the living crap out of other fighters. Training mode gives demostrations of the moves to help you learn the timing and stuff, and I love figuring out custom combo's by linking individual moves. Because I dont play enough though I would forget everything I learned if i switched characters and then went back though lol. Anyways Arcade mode is now the best single player mode. The tower mode even though most of the treasures have really stupid and insane requirements it would be fun to just climb up and down the tower and unlock the ones that you unlock and not care about the rest. Just for the challenge.
The other good part which I think is directly what is responsable for the rest of the gaming turning to crap is the Character Creator. Introduced in SC3 it was pretty cool. You couldnt clone body types and you couldnt wear signature outfits but you could finally make your own fighter and they even had a bunch of new generic weapon styles. The only thing you could do with signature character is color two outfits.
Now you can customize what story characters wear to and you have like 6 slots for each character!!! They removed some of the generic weapon types and added some others for created characters.
Ugh I forgot about this but your characters build, the weapon you choose to use and the items you wear give you STATS. You have attack/defence/health which come in the shape of a %. You also have stats in these other catagories represented by numbers. Power, Special, Guard, Impact, umm and 1-2 others lol. Your weapon and clothes besides adding or subtracting from you main 3 stats also add or subtract numbers to those secondary 5 skills. Putting on a pair of pants my raise your power from 10 to 20 for example. Or taped gauntlets could add 5 to impact and 5 to special.
What are the secondary skills for?? Well you know all the effects that can be on weapons, like damaging your oppoenet even if they block or absorbing life from inflicting damage or paralyzing/poisoning people?? Those are still on some weapons but they are called "skills" and if you have the secondary stat numbers you can equip skills to your fighter. Some skills come in various strengths. The higher the strength of the skill the more stats you will need.
For example to damage your opponent even while blocking you need a power of 80 and I think 20 in something else to equip the weakest version. Needless to say with the crap you start with at the beginning of the game you cant equip very many skills. Not to mention this means that in order to equip certain skills you have make your guy wear stuff you might not want him to wear. Your new custom bad ass...yeah he has to wear a giant diaper to inflict damage even when people guard. Not an actual example but you get the idea.
Oh and then some skills have "Style" requirements. Now you earn Style levels by just using your favorite weapon style. Like Nightmare or Taki. Like to get the skill that does the most damage even when being blocked might require you to get to style level 8. I was hoping raising your weapon style would also raise your base levels of the 5 secondary stats so you could equip more skills the more you leveled up your style.....
But it looks like the only way to equip more skills is to climb the stupid tower and fulfill insanely difficult requirements in order to win the treasure so you get new clothing items with big stat boosters on them.
If you play against other people you can choose whether or not you want stats and skills to be a factor. If you just play a normal match stats and skills wont matter.
To go along with clothing give your stats and stuff they also gave us the ability to smash equipment off of your opponent. While a location has been exposed they take more damage there and I dont know what else. I'd would rather they bring back the weapon breaking from Soul Blade that was so awesome.
So in review, the combat is still awesome and if you really love to fight or if you have people to play with this game will be great. If you are more casual and just like to have fun with your fighters then this game sucks. I would only get this game for super cheap, Using custom characters or even the new custom story characters is fun but I can't handle the shallow game modes and difficult reward system.
If I didnt mention it Soul Blade/Calibur since the playstation era. With that slight change to KO's, and the total lack of single player gameplay modes, this is my least favorite, I don't care how cool the character editor is....