There is no game series out there that means more to me than Virtua Fighter. I spent my weekly allowance to play VF and VF2 in arcades, cavorted cross-country in search of rare Virtua Fighter 3 cabinets, and eventually connected with overseas friends by playing VF4 Evolution and Final Tuned in Japan. So when I see a new–or new-ish, in this case–Virtua Fighter game get released, I want it to be the best it can possibly be. Not just for myself, but so others can pick it up and understand why we longtime Virtua Fighter players adore these games so much.
Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown–released a few years back on PS4–was a solid attempt at this, bringing the much-loved VF5 Final Showdown to PS4 with a fresh coat of paint. However, it fumbled in some key areas–particularly the netcode, which was a bizarre delay-based system in an era when fighting game developers were quickly and vocally embracing superior rollback systems. Now, with a new Virtua Fighter in active development and people talking about the series again, Sega has given us Virtua Fighter 5 REVO: another revision exclusively for PCs with the much-longed-for and player-demanded rollback netcode.
The rollback netcode is clearly the major selling point here, as much of the game is still built upon the foundation of VF5 Ultimate Showdown: The menu graphics, interface, and character models are largely the same, with a bit of extra polish and visual flair if you’ve got solid graphics hardware. But that’s fine–those areas didn’t need much improvement, so why fix what isn’t broken?
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