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Sometimes it’s very difficult, no matter how you try to frame it in your head, to get excited for re-releases of certain retro fighting games. It’s a genre that’s ripe for the picking, absolutely stuffed full of crackers to be revisited but, for every delightful return to the likes of Samurai Shodown 2, Guilty Gear, or Street Fighter, you’re gonna end up with something that has no real reason to be revived at all. Something like SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos.
A product of what’s known as SNK’s ‘dark period’, what you’ve got here is an arcade game that looks the part, sounds the part, and has a roster that should be kicking ass and taking all the names. However, as nicely as it’s presented — and a quick glance at these screenshots still makes us want to go on a retro-fighter bender — it’s just…not very good, and it never was.
The problem, to keep it short and simple, is that in comparison to any other King of Fighters or Street Fighter game from this era, or in comparison to any other Capcom/SNK crossover (of which there are four in total) this is a strangely bland, unbalanced and soulless slugfest. It’s got crappy enemy AI, it’s famously unfair, there are no team mechanics, and its bosses are the worst sort of cheap, gauge-defying spam-bastards going.
There’s also no real killer special or mechanic to make things especially interesting, with the core combat diluted down from what previous crossovers gave us. It really is bog-standard, early-noughties fare, not even a patch on a lot of the other fighters that released in 2003 (we still love you, Bloody Roar 4). It’s a joyless return, in actuality, once the old nostalgia cooks off – after about a minute. It’s tedious, the AI isn’t fun to compete against (so terribly cheap), and there’s very little time or space to get into a groove – a hangover from the fact it’s designed to steal all your shiny coins down the local pool hall.
Of course, on the other hand, there’s a phenomenal roster of over 30 fighters to choose from, and there’s undoubtedly always going to be a certain amount of fun to be had from jumping into a quick bout as your favourite old-school brawler – before very quickly discovering that the passage of time has robbed you of your speed and skills.
SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos is also legitimately very nice-looking. It hasn’t seen any touch-ups beyond a resolution bump for this port, but its detailed animations, sublime character designs, and arenas still impress. It was also somewhat ahead of its time with high-quality speech samples, so if that floats your boat you’re definitely in luck. Pervert.
Whilst this port “retains the classic visuals and controls” (a nice way of putting the fact they didn’t bother to make any improvements), you do get a brand new online mode that allows you to play tournaments, round robins, and eliminations with up to nine other players via bare-bones lobbies. What’s more, this new mode comes with fancy rollback netcode so it works properly.
And it actually does work properly on Switch! We’ve had various games over the past few days and the performance has been flawless. Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, there aren’t many people playing online, we only found two others to face off against so far, but this mode works well and could be a really good time if you get the right crowd together for a laugh. Oh, and we really do mean for a laugh too, as there’s no ranked competitive element here. Bonus sadness unlocked.
Performance on Switch is fine, as expected for a game of this vintage. At the end of the day, if you’ve ever just really wanted to have a portable copy of SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos, now you do. Just don’t expect to find online matches for very long, or to spend a great deal of time in its paltry offline modes — Arcade, 1v1, or Practice — before growing very bored of it all.
Conclusion
SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos is a very average arcade fighter, a game that wasn’t great over 20 years ago, and still isn’t now. For retro-fighter enthusiasts, there’s some interesting aspects to this port in the form of an online mode and the fact the whole thing looks and sounds so great. However, with a very low player count in its lobbies, and nothing more besides a gallery and practice mode by way of extras, this is a very hard experience to recommend to anyone outside of history buffs.