Capcom Fighting Evolution Review Like it or not, Capcom has created some of the best and most memorable 2D fighting games known to all gamers. Their roster includes franchises such as Street Fighter (and trillions of sequel’s and remakes), Darkstalkers, and many more. Since there are so many different fighting games, players have always wanted to prove that their favorite character could take their friends favorite fight character in a different game. If you were one of these people, Capcom has heard your plea and created a fighting game that takes characters, their moves, and other things and puts them in one game to face off against each other. Now that your wish has come true, are you ready for the challenge? There are a couple of different game modes to choose from: Arcade, Versus, Training, and Xbox Live. Arcade mode plays like any arcade mode in any fighting game would. You choose your characters and the fight it out to see if you can beat anyone that comes before you. Versus mode allows you and a friend to duke it out to see who the better fighter is. Training mode will allow you to get adjusted to the game’s mechanics and prepare yourself for all of the other game modes. If you choose Xbox Live you will get to play against other people from around the world to gain the bragging rights of who is the best player in the entire world. Capcom Fighting Evolution is a combination of the following games: Street Fighter II, Street Fighter Alpha, Street Fighter III, Darkstalkers, and Red Earth. This game takes several of the more popular characters from each game, and pits them against each other. Each of the characters from their particular game retains their special moves and gameplay style. For instance, Street Fighter II is all about getting powerful combos to knock your enemies into oblivion while Red Earth characters main focus is on guarding and then waiting for the perfect chance to attack. My biggest complaint I have with this game is the character selection. While the characters they choose were some of the more popular ones, why not include a more robust selection for us to choose from. There are more than 20 characters to choose from in this game. Even though 20 characters sounds like a lot, if you factor in that this spans five different games you will have a better understanding for this complaint. Personally there are many characters from Darkstalkers that I prefer over the ones that I am allowed to use. It is not like adding more characters would have been overkill for the space needed on the game disk. This is one of the game’s biggest weaknesses. Since they are marketing this like it is the huge mesh of fighting games they needed to include at least half of the fighting roster from each game, if not the entire roster to make it feel more complete. Another huge gripe I have with this game is the pseudo-tag system. When you first load the game you get to choose two characters. After playing multitudes of fighting games, when you choose two different characters this means that during a match you will get to tag them out to help expand your fighting strategies. During my first match I pressed every button on that Xbox controller trying to figure out how to do a tag out. To my horror I found out that you don’t tag out during the game, when you lose or win a match, it is then that you use your other character for the next match. In my mind I was thinking how lame is that? If you have the choice to choose between two characters for a match, let me tag them in and out; we are not back in the original PlayStation days when there was more of a hardware limitation to make that hard to do. Everything from Capcom Fighting Evolution has been ported over from their original games. This means that the characters look exactly like they did back in their main games, which means some characters will look better and slightly more detailed than some of the other ones. Since the developer’s just hand picked just several of the fighters from each game would it have been that hard to make sure they all looked somewhat the same. I have to admit I am still somewhat impressed by the environments that the fighters will do battle in. They are nicely detailed and have some background animation as well as cameos of some of the other fighting characters (that should have been included in this game) during the fights. The explosions and special effects are nicely done though. Not only does this game use the same artwork for the characters, but it also uses the same voices, sound effects, and music from those games as well. This is not that bad because many people are used to certain characters yelling a certain way as they perform an attack. I would have liked it if the game would have supported custom soundtracks so I could listen to some more updated music while I beat down some of the characters than the same music Capcom has been using all of these years. Capcom Fighting Evolution is rated T for Teen for suggestive themes and violence. Review Scoring Details for Capcom Fighting Evolution Gameplay: 6.7 Depending on the characters you choose to fight as, Capcom Fighting Evolution will play exactly how you remember it. I just have to wonder what is up with choose two characters for each match, and not even get to tag between them? That was just a poor choice in my opinion, let us either choose one character to fight with, or let us tag out between the two characters.