Technically superior...a comphresive tutorial...near impossible to master.
User Rating: 9 | Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution PS2
Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution The Specs- Publisher: Sega Developer: AM2 Price: £15-£30 Memory Card space: 160KB Minimum Video modes: 50 Hz, 60 Hz Vibration support: Yes Pro Logic II support: No Multiplayer Support: 2 Players (Versus) Online\LAN support: No Genre: Technical Beat ‘em-ep Learning Curve: -See review Completion time: 12 Minutes (Arcade) 60hrs (Quest with one character) Total time: Most people never pick up more than one character Beat ‘em ups have evolved---------------- Virtua Fighter 4: Evolution (shortened to Evo) is a one of a kind beat ‘em up. It is essentially an upgrade of Virtua Fighter 4. So if you can’t decide which one to get then get this as it’s all that plus more. This game has a cult following and is essentially the most technically driven beat ‘em up of all time. Many players may come from a Tekken Camp and may feel alienated by the pacing and the fact that the game is a case of no pain no gain, if you don’t put the work in then you don’t get anything out of it. In this sense Evo is a real accomplishment, the more you love the game the more it’ll love you back. Also many people are from the SNK Playmore or Street Fighter camp, these people may be put off by 3D beat ‘em ups, but rest assured, just like King Of Fighters and Capcom vs SNK this game boasts no nonsense fighting, true there is no flashy special moves but it also is one of the few games where button bashers won’t succeed, and speaking as a 2D beat ‘em up enthusiast I know the importance of skill over fluke. Evo is a game that many people should play, if you found beat ‘em ups too fast or too tricky to handle then this is a great entry into the genre, in fact it even has a tactile aspect to it that can draw in the hardcore and RTS fans alike, get ready-Fighting has evolved! Practive, patience, payoff--------------------------- When most people play beat ‘em ups they instinctively head to where the meat of the game lies, in the mission modes. However after playing Evo you will from that point on be converted to rating every beat ‘em up on the quality of its Training mode. It’s no exaggeration to say that training mode is the most important on offer here. This will no doubt sound strange to some people but this is the mode which will help you hone your skills and unlike games like Soul Calibur where the training mode offers a chance to smack your opponent senseless, Evo really helps you learn you moves through and through. My recommendation to anyone playing this game is to go to options and set the controls up how you like and then head of to practice and go through the beginner tutorial, it may stun you learn how complex knocking someone out can be. In a sense Evo has more in common with real martial arts than arcade gaming. Although an arcade game it boasts an almost never ending depth and richness to combat. Each character may only have 70 or so moves but each move has it’s applications, none of them are useless, and if you are convinced a move is useless then you should practice with it as it’s only a matter of time till you find a use for it, if the move seems pointless, it’s just because you haven’t found a use for it. Another thing that may strike you about Evo is that how fair it all is. None of the characters are ‘better’ than other because the characters are so well balanced; the characters are just ‘different’. Some may complain that there are only 16 characters, me? I run to the tops of hills and shout “LOOK THERE SIXTEEN CHARACTERS!!”. A phrase that can sum up Evo is “less is more”. Almost no one will play with more than one character as you will eventually be drawn to one of them, and playing with any character other than your own feels strange. You will keep learning new things, and even after playing with the same character for ages and kicking ass you will still feel like you have so much to learn and you practice tirelessly perfecting combo attacks, and learning more and more about the battle system. In this sense it really is like the real thing, you will feel the warrior monk inside you wanting to play this game in the same way he would meditate at the top of the mountain, endlessly learning but always with room for perfection. In fact this is the only beat ‘em up where you will save replays of matches you lost horribly, then you’ll play them in slow motion and find out what you did right and wrong. In Evo even a thrashing means that you have an opportunity to learn something. You also get the whole of the Evo tournaments played by professionals and you can see the tournament unfold. You can slow the replays and you can even see what button commands people are inputting (even if it’s the opponent) so if they are playing as your character you can copy and learn their combos and apply them accordingly. Quest mode----------------------- One of the new modes to Evo is ‘Quest’ mode. It’s essentially a mission mode but instead of wrapping it all up in a dramatic context the idea is that you must travel around Japan to SEGA arcades (some of which exist in real life!) and challenge players of increasing skill levels. You are given missions to do in order to open a tournament in the arcade you are in and then you must come within the top 3 to open up the next arcade. Also you can take up optional quests which allow you cash prizes and items. You see in Evo you customize your character, it’s all cosmetic but a nice touch. You get to change the characters clothes and add cool or just plain daft thing to them. For example Jeet Kune Do specialist Jacky can have items like sunglasses on or silly things like a babys’ dummy in his mouth. You can also customize the characters ring name. The most intriguing thing though is the ability to rank up. You start at 10th Kyu and work your way up to 1st Kyu ranking then its First Dan and you work up to 10th Dan. Then things get interesting as you are embezzled with fancy ranks such as ‘Destroyer’ or ‘Warrior’. The ultimate rank being champion. This is worked out by how many opponents you beat. So if start winning a lot of matches against tough opponents then you get promotion matches and get to rank up, be weary though as playing badly means you rank will fall. The clever thing about the ranking system is that although it is completely aesthetic is still feel important, to be honest I have no idea how AM2 have managed this. You never get too frustrated when your rank drops though as you’ll simply feel; “Well, guess I need more training to be worthy” and off you go back to training mode for 2 hours confident in the knowledge that your hard work will pay off.-and believe me it does. The characters themselves---------------------- As I have mentioned before the characters are all highly balanced and never feel too strong, in fact if you try playing as the other characters you’ll see they have it just as hard as you. Each character has a different martial arts style, and some styles may appear similar but after a while you realize they are indeed different in some pretty complex ways. For example Jacky and Sarah both have a back flip. However Jackys’ is slower and goes completely vertical leaving him open to counter-attacks if blocked but he more than makes up for this with power. Sarah on the other hand has a back flip that doesn’t go quite as high is executed faster and whilst doing the flip she recedes a little. The key difference? Jackys is offensive and Sarahs is defensive. I could keep going about the differences (and that’s just with these two moves). In fact the moves are so in depth that the addition of two new moves could keep you discovering their applications and shortcomings for hours. The characters in themselves do have some back story, but it’s really irrelevant, even arcade mode doesn’t have an ending. This game is about game play pure and simple. The martial arts style as I said varies as does the character designs; macho black woman Vanessa exhibits a dirty fighting style called Vale-Tudo and shaolin monk Lei-Fei exhibits his respective style along with one of the two newcomers “Brad” who shows off Kick boxing. The two new characters Brad and Goh will present the strongest challenge to Virtua Fighter veterans as well as offering a good start to new Virtua Fighter players as they seem to be tailored to new comers, but can still become very potent weapons in the hands on an expert. How does it play?-------------------- The button configuration makes sense; you have three buttons, punch, guard and kick. Naturally these do what they say, but also you can combine them and make Kick + Guard, the result isn’t some random move but a move that feels like it is a complex kick technique. So tapping kick just kicks but when buttons are used in tandem they trigger things like spinning kicks. Also the directions relate sensibly to the moves, so a sweeping kick is triggered with the forward-down diagonal and a kick that chips at the feet it triggered with down + kick. This helps you learn you moves list faster, it will initially take you some time to get through a characters move list but eventually you’ll begin to execute everything easily and fly through it all. This is where some beat ‘em ups fall into a trap of making the best move really difficult to pull off, here all the moves are relatively simple in execution, it’s just up to the players judgment to apply them well and string together combos ,and herein lies the skill. Also Evo is very fair and never forces you into one situation, or example when an enemy attempts to throw you, if you input the commands they used you escape from the throw, so if they press forward + punch + guard (throws are executed by Punch + guard combinations) and you press it then you escape-but, here’s the clever bit. In game like Soul Calibur 2 you had one chance to escape the throw; did they pull it off with A or with B? How the hell am I supposed to know? In Evo you can quickly tap Punch + Guard and multiple directions to escape. So as long as you eventually hit the right direction you escape. This makes it possible to escape every throw, and you’ll soon learn which directions the enemy uses, and some characters like Shun are very easy to escape whilst others like Wolf (who can throw using just about any direction) are harder to escape. You’ll also be able to predict when a throw is coming as certain moves of yours when blocked leave you open for so long that a throw is almost inevitable. The only throws that are inescapable are those that derive from regular moves but then those moves can be avoided or blocked. I would also like to demonstrate the flexibility of this system. Say you are in a situation were you think you are going to be thrown so you try to pull off a throw escape but to you surprise the enemy punches instead, isn’t that annoying? If tried blocking instead you could have been thrown! And if you tried evading younwould have been thrown. What Evo does here is that it allows you to combine a dodge and a throw escape and make a so-called “evading throw-escape”. So you simply evade and start entering throw escape commands at the same time. The result is you can avoid getting hurt from both at the attacks at the same time as you evaded early enough to avoid the fist (because you didn’t stick around to see if it was a punch or throw coming) and still were prepared with a throw escape should your opponent attempt to throw you. I’m sorry if this seems boring but this is one of the things that separates Evo from the competition, that you can always find a way out. Everything can be fused in this manner so you can never be stopped just because you took one course of action over another: throw escapes, parries, counters, evading and retreating and more can all be mixed to stop fights becoming unfair, you will never feel punished for taking one right action (dodging) only to have it lead to a bad consequence (being thrown). The fighting engine in Evo is very robust and the one of the best I’ve seen yet, it’s just so immaculately worked out. The pacing is something special as well as it has no set speed. The faster you play the faster it gets. You determine the pacing, this may sound over-joyous but when playing in a heated battle against a computer opponent it can be a lot faster than against a computer amateur. As I have said several times before the keyword here is “depth”, and believe it’s so deep that if the games tutorial didn’t pass you a life buoy you’d drown. How many other fighting games have their own inbuilt encyclopedias on fighting definitions? The presentation--------------- I’ve rolled graphics and sound into one area. What you get is all the stages from Virtua Fighter 4 but in two guises, the VF4 versions and the Evo versions. They look different and have different soundtracks. Some of the stages have been altered so the older versions may be fully fenced off and the newer ones may be partially fenced off. The graphics have been scaled down quite a lot from the arcade version but for a PS2 title it looks pretty good. The characters are all motion captured, but most of the animations themselves are over three years old and have been recycled from Virtua Fighter: 3tb on the Dreamcast, but in fairness the models don’t have a really wooden look to them nor do they look like action figures a la Dead or Alive 3. The complaints I have “hear” (geddit?) is with the sound quality; there are a limited number of overly-exaggerated sound effects. These are highly functional though and cue you in on whether the attack that’s coming is going to be a spinning attack or a throw (yes, for some reason in this game sound travels faster than light). I’ll forgive that because it’s helpful. The other complaints are with the soundtracks which are typical SEGA techo-rock beats, the older VF: 4 soundtrack is very good but the new one is rather lackluster, and this is especially apparent because you’ll hear the Evo tunes far more frequently than the originals. This however pales in comparison to the horror that is the voice acting, although the Japanese characters voices are okay the English ones are nasty and clearly performed by someone whose taken English as their 5th language, sometimes the things the characters say are either annoying or nonsensical or both, the very fact that listening to Lion proclaim “It’s a matter ,of course I’m gonna’ win” is painful than Kages “Izuna Itoshi” throw is testament to how bad it really is-you will wince in pain! And you though the sound was bad---------------- This game from a gameplay perspective in near enough perfect but there are some problems with it. The frightening voice over work I’ve already mentioned so I’ll go on to the others. One of the things that got me was that the AI in arcade mode and in Quest are completely different meaning you’ll be more tempted to play arcade sometimes despite the lack of reward. This AI sound really should’ve been integrated into Quest mode so the player was given a more diverse opponent. Also if you are attempting to beat everyone is one of Quest modes arcades it takes ages (although 100% is entirely optional), the reason is because your next opponent is randomly picked. So in the early arcade if you only have 2 or 3 opponents left that’s okay as there’s only a potential pool of 30 opponents for them to be picked from, but in the later arcade when there are 100+ competitors this can take a very long time. Another apparent problem is that there are very few stages which have breakable walls, meaning that doing missions that require you to break walls can be fleshed out over a long time as you wait. This is most likely because there are only 3 stages out of 20 with breakable walls. This could have easily have been gotten around if AM2 had made a breakable walls, non-breakable fully fenced off, non-breakable partially fenced off and fully open version of each stage. The last thing is that in VF4 there was a mode where you took a ‘bot’ and attacked it giving it feedback when it did good and bad. You raised an AI in an AI training mode and taught it how to fight and mix and make combos. This is missing from Evo and this will come as bit of a blow to most VF fans. Anyway all in all I’m going to have to end on a positive note; you should have this game if you have a PS2 as the PS2 lacks many high quality titles which aren’t available elsewhere in superior incarnations. Simply put, if Halo is combat evolved then this reinvents the whole damn wheel. Graphics- 9.0 Controls- 10.0 Sound- 7.5 Longevity- 9.5 Overall- 8.5 (This review is marked out of twenty units, 7.5 then 8.0 then 8.5 etc, the reason is because any two sets of 9s can still have a large difference between them, and there isn’t a sizeable difference between a 92% and a 93%. Also using an odd rating system like out of 5 means there is not clear cut average score).
