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The SNK vs. games finally start to arrive. A while back, Capcom and SNK agreed to develop games which included the main publisher’s characters fighting against the others. Capcom cashed in on this opportunity with many Capcom vs. SNK games, but SNK’s business-related problems didn’t let it fulfill its end. After a few years, we now receive SVC Chaos, a fun but flawed 2D Xbox Live fighter.
SVC Chaos includes the typical modes for a fighter. You’ll find the practice mode, arcade mode, survival mode, two-player offline versus, and of course, the Xbox Live versus mode. The game’s arcade mode is the typical arcade mode; you’ll fight many bosses as you go in a story mode and eventually unlock an ending for that character. In survival, you’ll need to defeat as many opponents as possible without dying. The incentive for completing the arcade mode is to get the endings, but for the survival mode you’ll be able to unlock an artwork gallery.
The reason that most fans will pick up this game (not including rabid SNK fans who will pick up anything the publisher releases) are the plethora of characters. You’ll find over thirty characters made up of Capcom and SNK’s respective camps. You’ll find Kyo from King of Fighters and Ken and Ryu from Street Fighter, among many others which will surely please nostalgic fighting fans. Each of the characters has a number of unique moves to them, made up of a variety of special moves and the more traditional kicks and punches. Along each match, you’ll be able to fill up a special meter which will enable you to unlock the truly fascinating moves.
As mentioned in the introduction, SVC Chaos: SNK vs. Capcom is a fully functional Xbox Live title so you’ll find the main features like access to your friends list, scoreboards and voice chat. Finding someone to play is a rather painless process and there are people playing throughout the day. Gameplay isn’t prone to lag, but it does happen occasionally, more than one would help, and does interfere with the precision-based fighting of the game. Thankfully, these moments aren’t too frequent. A pretty major mishap by SNK is in the inability to rematch an opponent after a match, which would have been awesome.
The game’s visuals were probably great ten years ago. Now, they are substandard with very simple, low-resolution sprites used which is a shame with the Guilty Gear games looking oh, so excellent. As this is an old engine, the animation isn’t very fluid and moreover, the characters’ attacks feel a bit floaty; they simply don’t behave like you would expect them to.
The audio doesn’t fare much better, with a repetitive soundtrack further hampered by bare-bones sound effects and voice acting.
SVC Chaos: SNK vs. Capcom isn’t bad. The actual fighting is solid, and the addition of Xbox Live play, oversights and all, is appreciated. However, it’s hard to recommend the game when SNK hasn’t done much to upgrade the game’s engine or battle system in so long. As of right now, SNK fans will love, they probably wouldn’t want anything else but everyone else will only find a merely average fighter. -- Adam Nunez, PGNx Media
---- Oct 18, 2004
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