Got my hands on a copy of the game. Quick impressions:
- If you guys thought Brawl was floaty... WOAH! Wait until you play this. Unfortunately, this also makes the game a little slow.
- The characters feel way more like each other than in Smash games.
- Its really easy to unlock everyone
- Casey Jones = Ike lol
- Stage hazards are excessive. Getting insta-killed by them is annoying. If you hold a tourney for this, stick to the non-hazard stages entirely.
- Missions are pretty nifty
- Teams will be better than singles & tagteam mode looks fun.
- Fun, but not as good as I'd hoped.
EDIT (more impressions):
- Nightwatcher = Top Tier? Maybe so!
- you can't turn off tap-jump
- You can attack directly out of techs, but you can't break your tumble when you get hit for a LOOOONG time.
- The "point" mechanic is stupid.
- Counter-throws and face offs are hard to do now, but I imagine that people will get really good at them and make throwing really dangerous to try and clanking really obnoxious.
- There are only 16 confirmed characters, but 4 spots left on their official website. We are currently trying to find out how to unlock more characters. I'm guessing that Leatherhead and Baxter Stockman are definitely in, with two more surprises to come.
- There are definitely "sweet spots" to certain attacks, ala Marth's tipper in Melee.
A few disagreements and impressions of my own...
- I don't think the floatiness matters much, since you can downfall so fast now. You don't want to be in the air anyways most of the time - that's not how you'll be racking up many hits.
- The characters are all similar to each other on some basic generalities. In Brawl everyone had highly distinct special attacks, whereas most everyone in this game has some givens. AAB is always going to be a knockback combo for example. But once you start looking into which moves stun, which moves turnaround the opponent, which moves combo into one another, etc, there's a great deal of variation between each character. Enough so that you can't expect to learn one character and apply the same to the next and do decent.
You really need to go into practice mode with each individual character you want to learn, which is something I almost never did in the Smash games. There's a bit more 'dial-a-combo' moments relative to them as well.
- Tap jump isn't really a problem, since you can now do up-tilts with a forward-up tilt.
- Haven't played much with Casey, but he's a little faster than Ike IMO. Some people have compared him to Link in Brawl. Like most characters though, I still don't think there's really a Brawl equivalent.
Some characters actually feel like they have Soul-Calibur equivalents. That'd be a good way to describe the game actually - it's almost as if SC and SB had a baby. The result is a game that's definitely unique, and a lot of fun I think.