Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. Early Impressions

So, Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. has been out for a few days, the dust is still far from settling, but now that thousands of players got to play the game, we can already start looking at how it's being received and what sort of criticism players have.

One of the most contentious elements is, predictably, the netcode. SEGA has been staying away from the field for too many years now, and early implementations have a tendency of being rough around the edges. In this regard, R.E.V.O. is somewhat inconclusive. Some people are reporting that they get very few matches, and once they do find someone, the ping is terrible.

Even people within the same region, or just generally close to each other, are noticing pings that are much higher than what they would usually get in the exact same conditions. Having had time to play a bit myself, I've also noticed that many connections would display an oddly consistent 100ms or 120ms connection, in spite of how extremely unlikely this is for a P2P connection with half a dozen different people. In spite of this, the majority of games felt rather fine, which perhaps points towards this being a visual bug.

Regardless of actual online experience, something that absolutely everyone has been experiencing is the inaccurate connection indicator. Even if you limit connection filter to "best," the actual connection is a bit of a coin flip. Whenever the game finds a new opponent, the network icon will be green at first, but will typically switch to yellow or even red if you wait a little.

Outside of network issues, the only real complaint raised against the new release is the arguably greedy approach to customization. Many negative Steam reviews mention the complete lack of customization that was promised in the game's description. The game only comes with two costumes for each character, and customization is limited to at most a few swappable parts per character. Anyone who really wants to deck out their character in fancy gear will have to purchase the 30th anniversary pack, or one of the collaboration DLCs.

Fortunately, that's about as bad as it gets in terms of criticism. The actual game is a breath of fresh air in spite of being incredibly old at this point. These days, Virtua Fighter stands out as a relatively pure fighting game, with no reliance on special meters, comeback mechanics, or other gimmicks. It's just two people fighting, with an incredibly deep system enabling the gameplay that is both hyper aggressive, fast, yet very tactical.