Based on 2021’s Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown, R.E.V.O. will bring the fighter to PC in spruced up fashion, with support for 4K and 60 FPS gameplay. Alongside that, the game will also tout rollback netback for those really looking to sink their teeth into its competitive offerings. Check out the announcement trailer below. 

Interestingly, the game’s PC release will be accompanied by a 2.0 balance update for the base PS4 game. Sega hasn’t yet revealed what the update will bring, but it’s supposed to be the first rebalancing update for the game in 13 years, so whatever it is, it should be interesting. 

There’s no word yet on when Virtua Fighter 5 R.E.V.O. will launch, but you can wishlist it on Steam.

Announced during the Virtua Fighter 5’s Virtua Fighter esports challenge cup, the game will be collaborating with Bandai Namco’s Tekken 7. The collaboration will see mostly customization options for the game, such as Akira and Lau receiving the Kazuya and Heihachi costumes from Tekken 7 respectively, along with a Tekken-style HUD and a new stage from the Tekken series arriving in Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown.

No official release date for the update or price has been announced by SEGA yet. However, it is safe to assume that in the upcoming weeks, we’ll get to hear more news regarding the upcoming content update.

This year’s show will see the participating developers sit down to talk about various themes related to fighting games and the current esports scene. Additionally, the show has planned to organize what is called a “treasure appraisal project”, where each company will showcase their treasured collections related to fighting games.

The list of developers attending the show includes General Director of Guilty Gear series, Daisuke Ishiwatari alongside director of Guilty Gear Strive, Akira Katano; the President and CEO of Arika, Akira Nishitani; the Chief Producer of King of Fighters 15, Yasayuki Oda; The producer of Street Fighter 5, Shuhei Matsumoto; Chief Producer of SEGA’s Virtua Fighter eSports, Seiji Aoki; and Chief Producer of Tekken Katsuhiro Harada.

Even though no news of any games revealed by either of the company has been confirmed or teased until now, past shows did have reveals in the form of new characters and seasons for several games, so here’s hoping new reveals await in this year’s show as well.

July’s titles will replace Star Wars: Squadrons and Operation Tango, which will continue to be available to users until July 6th. June’s other free title, Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown, will continue to be free until August 2nd, along with July’s other PlayStation Plus titles.

It’s an impressive lineup for PlayStation fans, offering one of the most popular shooters around in Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, an excellent fighting game, a surprisingly good arcade-style wrestling brawler, and one of the best narrative titles of 2019, which will see a higher framerate, better resolution, and faster loading times on PS5.

All told, there’s plenty to be excited about if you’re a PlayStation Plus subscriber in July. Just make sure you grab Star Wars: Squadrons and Operation Tango before they’re gone, if you haven’t already.

In a recent interview with Famitsu (via Siliconera), chief producer Seiji Aoki spoke about just that. According to Aoki, Sega hasn’t yet made any decision regarding a Virtua Fighter 6 (even though he personally would like to work on a new game in the series).

“Nothing has been decided yet regarding Virtua Fighter 6, so I cannot make any statement,” Aoki said. “But if you ask me whether I want to create it or not, I do want to create it.”

As you’d expect, Aoki added that one of the purposes Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown is going to serve will be to judge interest in and demand for the series, which should inform any decisions about its future.

“This title [Ultimate Showdown] will let us know whether there are demands and potentials for Virtua Fighter,” Aoki said. “We want to hype it up so it can connect to the next one.”

Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown, meanwhile, is available on PS4. For PS Plus subscribers, it’s going to be available for free until the end of July.

First things first, don’t worry or hope that the gameplay has been radically altered for this version of Virtua Fighter 5. The basic frame counts for each move, command lists, and character roster are basically untouched in this version, which makes sense as its previous iterations got the Virtua Fighter gameplay to quite a refined level of attunement, and frankly it doesn’t really need anything else in that area. It’s still the same highly technical and finely-balanced fighting game it has always been. It has, however, been visually updated with the help of the dragon engine; the same set of tools used in Yakuza 6 and Judgement. This is the most profound change for this version, as lighting is significantly more realistic with less of the more cartoony amounts of saturation the previous versions had, more depth to the game’s color palette, sharper character models and noticeably more lush backgrounds for every arena.

"It’s still the same highly technical and finely-balanced fighting game it has always been."

As a result, Ultimate Showdown doesn’t quite reach Mortal Kombat 11 or Tekken 7 levels of detail, but it does look great and could certainly pass for an early native PS4 game. This really speaks to the level of effort put into overhauling the game’s visuals but also to the integrity of the original game, as the animations and models themselves haven’t had much done to them at all, but still look very nice most of the time. You will see some stiff movements and some bland textures here and there at times which do hint at the game’s age, but overall, I find that the work that was done with the visuals combined with how well-made it was for its time a reasonably effective combination of efforts that keep the game looking and playing quite well. This is complimented well by a newly-overhauled and minimal user interface that gets right to the point as most modern interfaces do.

The audio is handled almost – but perhaps not quite – as well. While the newly scored tracks definitely fit the experience well, I noticed a handful of occasions where the balancing of music vs sound effects seemed way off. A punch sound effect would be loud and… well… punchy, but then a kick would be barely audible right after that. Also, some menu sound effects were comically loud compared to the background music. The audio department isn’t helped much by some very low bitrate voices. Many of the voice samples sound like they were lifted from the Sega Saturn version, let alone the PS3 one. I’m not sure if they sounded that way in the previous version of the game and it was just more forgivable then, or if that’s a new issue, but either way, the sound is easily the biggest thing holding this game back from feeling like a modern game.

The gameplay is of course the shining beacon of success for the game. Its extremely balanced roster of characters all have compelling reasons to play them, yet are also very challenging to master. Virtua Fighter combat is highly underrated in the genre, as its complex, and sometimes obtuse feeling button combinations can feel off-putting at first, especially if you’re a huge fan of more accessible fighters like Dead or Alive, but that initial steepness of the learning curve does give way to some extremely rewarding moments when Virtua Fighter’s strange rules, like mapping block to a face button and having no dedicated jump button whatsoever, finally click. As a big Tekken fan, it definitely took me some time to get back into the Virtua Fighter mindset. Training my brain to stop backing up when I wanted to block, and get used to only jumping when a very specific jump attack is needed were hard muscle memory rules to break, but if I can get there, so can you.

"Virtua Fighter combat is highly underrated in the genre, as its complex, and sometimes obtuse feeling button combinations can feel off-putting at first, especially if you’re a huge fan of more accessible fighters like Dead or Alive, but that initial steepness of the learning curve does give way to some extremely rewarding moments when Virtua Fighter’s strange rules, like mapping block to a face button and having no dedicated jump button whatsoever, finally click."

And it’s well worth the work. Learning the basics as well as a handful of combos will probably be enough to get you to the last fight or two of the arcade modes, but you will need a relatively deeper understanding of your character (and your opponents’) moves before you should expect to beat it. That said, I did stumble into a weak point in the game’s AI that allowed me to spam my way to victory with Aoi pretty reliably in arcade mode. Outside of that though, I found the balance between the characters to hold up extremely well and it is absolutely comparable to the quality of balance in most modern fighting games. I just wish there were more ways to experience that finely-tuned fighting than the barebones selection of modes here. No survival, no story mode, or anything else is really here outside of the absolute basics. There is a pretty decent amount of character customization though, so credit where it’s due.

One more area this game hits a high and low note at the same time is its online functionality. A completely new layout to Virtua Fighter 5’s tournament mode is coming and should be available soon after launch that totally revamps the game’s competitive community with a new UI, more communication options, 16-player private rooms, the ability to spectate other matches while you wait for your turn, and league play. I was unable to test most of that to see how well it works before launch of course, but it’s a nice idea and clearly this is where a good amount of work has gone into this version. I was able to get into a couple of ranked matches and game rooms though and the stability seemed fine to me despite this game still using the dreadfully old net code of the original version, which is where I do think Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown may run into some trouble down the road – especially if it gets as popular and loaded up with players as Sega clearly wants it to.

While the net code for the original game was never particularly bad as far as I remember, I do remember noticing the occasional syncing issue as well as getting kicked out of matches for undiscernible reasons a bit more than I would have liked, and that was when there were far less people online playing these sorts of games. Hopefully enough tinkering around the edges of the net code for Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown has been done to avoid those issues and handle the weight of a larger community, but we’ll have to wait and see on that one. None of the new bells and whistles that have been added to the game’s online functionality will matter much if the game can’t sustain its own audience. That said, with what I have been able to test through ranked matches and rooms, everything has been pretty solid outside of a couple micro-stutters that quickly resolved themselves, so I suppose that is a good sign.

"Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown is a respectable remaster on multiple fronts."

Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown is a respectable remaster on multiple fronts. The visuals look great and the gameplay was wisely left alone. Outside of some auditory oddities, there’s not much stopping Ultimate Showdown from going toe-to-toe with most of its modern contemporaries. With many other 3D gaming franchises starting to feel a bit stale at this point, it will be very interesting to see if Virtua Fighter’s uniquely technical and anomalous style can catch yet another wave of interest in the fighting game space. It could greatly benefit from the timing of its release alone. Surely Sega is watching though, so if Ultimate Showdown does well, I would hope we’ll see more of the franchise in the future in the form of a new game that the series can really stretch its legs with.

This game was reviewed on the PlayStation 4.

This is in addition to 19 character costumes and the original game’s UI and stages. It’s quite a bit of value especially since Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown will be available free for PlayStation Plus subscribers in June. The fighting game is also launching on PlayStation Now.

Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown is more than just a simple port of the 2006 classic. It features completely revamped stages, improved character models and textures, and smaller details like sweat on characters. Sadly, it won’t have rollback netcode for its online multiplayer. Stay tuned for more details when it goes live today.

Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown is releasing on PlayStation 4 on June 1st, and will be available for PlayStation Plus subscribers from June 1st to August 2nd. Ultimate Showdown is a ground-up remake of Virtua Fighter 5, which originally released in arcades in 2006. The new game uses Yakuza‘s Dragon Engine to add high definition textures, new details like sweat on characters, and redone stages.

What the game won’t have, unfortunately, is rollback netcode, instead opting for the delay-based solutions of the past because the game is built on Virtua Fight 5 Final Showdown. Sega confirmed that the game would not use a rollback solution in an email to Kotaku. Without getting into a long technical explanation of why rollback netcode tends to work better, suffice it to say that it does, which is why several upcoming fighting games, like Guilty Gear Strive, are implementing rollback solutions. Delay-based netcode can work over small distances, and tends to work fine in Japan, but tends to fall apart across longer distances. That’s not to say that rollback is a perfect solution, as it can still be done poorly (see: Street Fighter V), but there’s a reason that many fighting game developers are implementing it. It’s unfortunate that Sega isn’t.

That’s not to say that Sega hasn’t done any work to further their eSports ambitions with Ultimate Showdown. Sega has added a 16-player Tournament mode, round-robin matches, and the ability to spectate matches in real-time. Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown had good netcode when it released in 2012, so hopefully that will continue to be true. You can get more information about Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown here.

Originally released in 2006 for arcades, Sega’s acclaimed Virtua Fighter 5 is making a comeback next week for PS4. Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown is a ground-up remake, utilizing Yakuza’s Dragon Engine to deliver vastly improved visuals. This includes high resolution textures, details like sweat and redone stages. A new trailer highlights all of the improvements – check it out below.

Sega has also released the opening movie for the fighter along with a trailer showcasing more gameplay. Along with launching on June 1st for PS4 (free for PlayStation Plus subscribers), the fighter will also be available in arcades for Japan on June 2nd.

Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown offers more than just better visuals though. It offers new modes to facilitate Sega’s esports push for the title including a Tournament mode for up to 16 players, round-robin matches and the ability to watch matches in real-time. You can even use stamps while watching, likely as a means to “cheer” for different fighters. Stay tuned for more details on the title in the coming days.

We’ve been seeing quite a few games launching with PlayStation Plus at launch, including the likes of Bugsnax, Destruction AllStars, and Oddworld: Soulstorm. PlayStation CEO Jim Ryan confirmed not too long ago that we’d be seeing more games following suit, and with the PS Plus lineup for June 2021 now confirmed, two of those have been unveiled.

The recently announced Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown was leaked as a June PS Plus game before it was even announced, and it’s now been confirmed. The game is launching on June 1, and will be available via PS Plus right at launch- not just through all of June, but for the following month as well, right up until August 2.

Meanwhile, upcoming co-op spy adventure title Operation: Tango will also be available for PlayStation Plus subscribers when it launches on June 1. It will be available until July 5- though only the PS5 version of the game is going to be available.

Finally, the third game for the month is not a new release, but it’s a pretty big title. Last year’s excellent space shooter Star Wars: Squadrons will be available via PS Plus all the way up until July 5. Considering the game’s excellent VR support (which is exclusive to PS4, incidentally), that’s a solid addition to the lineup.