Sometimes, no matter how hard you try to picture it in your head, it’s hard to get excited about the re-release of some classic fighting games. It’s a genre ripe for the picking, absolutely stuffed full of fun things to revisit but, for every exciting return to the likes of Samurai Shodown 2, Sinful Toysor Street Fighteryou’ll 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 would become known as SNK’s ‘dark ages’, what you have here is a game that looks like this, sounds like this, and has a list of games that should be great and win all the titles. But despite being beautifully presented—and just looking at these screenshots makes us want to play the retro-fighter—it’s just… not very good, and never was.
The problem, in short and simple terms, is that when compared to anything else king of warriors or Street Fighter games from this era, or any of the other Capcom/SNK crossovers (there were four in total) this is a bland, unbalanced, and strangely soulless brawler. It has terrible enemy AI, is notoriously unfair, has no team mechanics, and its bosses are cheap, spammy bastards that defy even the worst of standards.
There’s also no real special or killer mechanics to make things particularly interesting, with the core combat being watered down compared to what previous crossovers have given us. It’s pretty standard, early 2000s stuff, not even the patch for many other fighters released in 2003 (we still love you, Blood Roar 4). In fact, it’s a joyless return, once the old nostalgia wears off – after about a minute. It’s tedious, the AI isn’t fun to compete with (too cheap), and there’s little time or space to get into a rhythm – a hangover from the fact that it’s designed to steal all your shiny coins from the local pool hall.
Of course, on the other hand, there’s a roster of over 30 fighters to choose from, and there’s definitely a certain amount of fun to be had in engaging in a quick bout as your favorite classic martial arts fighter – before quickly discovering that time has robbed you of your speed and skill.
SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos is also really pretty. It hasn’t seen any tweaks beyond a resolution boost for this port, but the detailed animations, great character designs, and arenas still impress. It’s also a bit ahead of its time with high-quality voice samples, so if you’re into that, you’re in luck. Pervert.
While this port “Preserves classic visuals and controls” (a nice way of saying they didn’t bother improving anything), you’ll get a brand new online mode that lets you play tournaments, round-robins, and playoffs with up to nine other players through simple lobbies. What’s more, this new mode comes with fancy rollback netcode to work properly.
And it works really well on the Switch! We’ve had a few different games over the past few days and performance has been flawless. Unfortunately, and perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s no online multiplayer, we’ve only found two other people to play against so far, but the mode works well and can be a really great time if you get the right crowd together to laugh with. Oh, and we really mean laugh, since there’s no ranked competition element here. Sad rewards unlocked.
Performance on the Switch is fine, as expected for a classic game like this. At the end of the day, if you really wanted a portable copy of SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos, now you have one. Just don’t expect to find long online matches or spend much time in its few offline modes—Arcade, 1v1, or Practice—before getting very bored of them all.
Conclusion
SNK vs. Capcom: SVC Chaos is a very average arcade fighting game, one that wasn’t great over 20 years ago, and still isn’t great today. For fans of classic fighting games, there are some interesting aspects to this port in the form of the online mode and the fact that the entire game looks and sounds great. However, with very low player counts in the lobbies, and nothing more than a gallery mode and practice mode via add-ons, this is an experience that’s hard to recommend to anyone other than history buffs.
