Virtua Fighter 5 REVO is slightly less revolutionary than we'd hoped

Another visual facelift and new character balancing are nice, but the rollback netcode left something to be desired.

Image via Sega
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Virtua Fighter 5 REVO is the fourth version of the long beloved Sega fighter. It does a few things to try to make that worth your time, including bringing in rollback netcode and one of the biggest balances to the roster in quite a few years. So, is it worth it? Kind of. The balancing is nice, and this game is looking prettier than ever. However, if you came for the netcode, you might be a little disappointed. I could get matches in this game with relative ease, but it was very seldom those matches played out without some kind of jank across a wide variety of bouts.

Better balance for a better fight

Virtua Fighter 5 REVO goes hard to the paint on looks and balance of the characters. Everyone feels a little bit different, though your mileage may vary depending on which character you main and your familiarity with them before and after the changes to REVO. For me, it was a definite plus. I main Jeffry McWild and he feels great in this game. I ran myself through the tutorial, refamiliarized myself with his moveset, and was pounding folks into the dirt, picking them up, and going back to work in no time. McWild has always had a nasty flow, but being able to lift opponents off the ground by their face and throw them into walls to continue his combos feels better than ever. From what I’ve seen, a lot of the characters have similar satisfying changes.

The characters, stages, and UI of Virtua Fighter 5 REVO also feel as clean and crisp as ever. There’s a lot to like about what this game is doing, and it has plenty for players to engage in, offline and on. I really like VF5 REVO’s training mode. You can get a rundown of the game’s basics, but then you can also do “Command Training” and go through each character’s movelist, move by move, until you have successfully executed all of them. When you have a good grasp, there’s always Free Training to practice your combos and fine-tune your response to various situations. It’s a great set of tools to help newcomers and veterans alike develop their gameplan.

I think another of my favorite features (or at least it would be under certain circumstances) is the live online matches in the main menu while you figure out what you want to do. There, if you idle long enough, Virtua Fighter 5 REVO will connect you to a live online match as a spectator where you can watch other random opponents duke it out. I’ve long thought Street Fighter and Tekken are wasting their battle hubs by not doing something like this where we get to see other players fight in our spare time. It’s cool to see implemented here and I hope other fighting game developers take notice.

Rollback netcode… or at least something called as much

Jeffry taking a hard kick from Sarah in Virtua Fighter 5 REVO
Jeffry can unfortunately feel like a sitting duck in Virtua Fighter 5 REVO's rollback netcode.
Source: Sega

I waited an extra day till the game was live to post these impressions because I wanted to see how online play would handle. I’m glad I did because the answer is “pretty far from where I’d want it to be.” I know rollback netcode is the wave and appreciate Sega and Ryu Ga Gotoku Studios’ effort to bring it to VF5… but it’s not a good implementation, even if they slap "Beta" on the rollback options in settings.

In my most common matches, as close to stable as it seemed to get, the fight would start out buttery smooth, but by the time the first round was coming to an end, lag would rear its ugly head and not let up for the rest of the match. We’re talking about reducing the game from a clean and crisp 60 fps it plays at offline down to maybe 15-30 fps when the lag started to take hold. I guess to its credit, it was pretty stable lag. We wouldn’t go from fighting fluid to seeing every frame and back again. Instead, once it lagged, it would just kind of keep that lowered frame rate for the rest of the match.

And that was best case scenario for me. Usually it got worse to the point where I had to try to think three seconds ahead on Jeffry if I was going to win. Meanwhile, faster characters like Eileen and Sarah could just hit me with string after string while I tried to navigate delayed input after delayed input on a character with lumbering and slow normal attacks. I can win with Jeffry, but when the netcode is this rough, it becomes exponentially more difficult. Also, it just makes what would be an otherwise beautiful fighting game look sloppy as hell whenever online is involved, which also affects those online match views from the main lobby I was so fond of.

REVOffline only

Akira throwing Kage in Virtua Fighter 5 REVO
Akira is as strong as ever and maybe stronger in this version of Virtua Fighter 5.
Source: Sega

I think what Ryu Ga Gotoku did with this version of Virtua Fighter 5 feels great, but only in offline play. I feel for any team that has to figure out how to graft rollback netcode into a game that wasn’t built with that system in mind. We’ve seen it fail to work several times before. I’m afraid REVO looks like it’s joining those ranks without some serious post-launch fixes. It’s just not where it needs to be. Even then, with the next Virtua Fighter confirmed and on the way, this is something Sega and Ryu Ga Gotoku absolutely have to figure out sooner than later. I hope they do.


These impressions are based on a PC version of the game supplied by the publisher. Virtua Fighter 5 REVO is available now on PC.

Senior News Editor

TJ Denzer is a player and writer with a passion for games that has dominated a lifetime. He found his way to the Shacknews roster in late 2019 and has worked his way to Senior News Editor since. Between news coverage, he also aides notably in livestream projects like the indie game-focused Indie-licious, the Shacknews Stimulus Games, and the Shacknews Dump. You can reach him at tj.denzer@shacknews.com and also find him on BlueSky @JohnnyChugs.

From The Chatty
  • reply
    January 28, 2025 7:00 AM

    TJ Denzer posted a new article, Virtua Fighter 5 REVO is slightly less revolutionary than we'd hoped

    • reply
      January 28, 2025 8:20 AM

      This one hurt a bit. I love Virtua Fighter 5 and I really wanted this version's rollback netcode to be the real deal. It sure as heck wasn't, and I can't abide a bad online experience in 2025. There are too many other good options to put up with that.

      • reply
        January 28, 2025 9:48 AM

        It works well when the connection is good AND both sides are getting a locked 60fps.

        And this is, as far as I'm aware, Sega's first time using rollback netcode. They have an official discord and the Steam forums to track bugs, so I expect the netcode will be improved over the coming months.

        And I suspect the whole purpose of this game in the first place might be just as a test bed to work on netcode in preparation for VF6 in the future.

        But speaking of FPS, what hardware were you playing this on? This actually needs a fairly beefy PC to play at native 60fps. If you're just relying on Gsync to smooth things out, and you're dipping below 60, that's going to wreak havoc on the netcode. Which might explain why you were having a worse experience than others.

        Because you really have to treat this more like a fixed-refresh game and pretend like your monitor doesn't have variable refres rate. Sega of course should probably do a better job making this clear to the end users.

        • reply
          January 28, 2025 9:49 AM

          fairly beefy PC to play at 60fps at 4k, I meant to say.

          A low spec PC should do fine with this at 1080p I imagine

          • reply
            January 28, 2025 10:33 AM

            I run a ROG Strix with a 3070 Ti, 16GB memory, and a 12th Gen Intel(R) Core(TM) i9-12900H. I ran the game at 1080, had it on standard settings, and set the Rollback netcode settings to Performance during my play time. I'm sitting at the recommended settings on most fronts and well above minimum, so I can't imagine it's my system being stressed. I also run Guilty Gear Strive and Tekken matches regularly and usually restart my router to make sure the connection is clear, so I don't think it's my internet either.

            I definitely agree with you that this is probably a foundation to build towards VF6. I just feel like it's a rough starting point.

            One of the most annoying common things that would happen is the frames would dip in an online match and stay consistently at that dipped state for the rest of the match. It's the weirdest thing I've ever seen a fighting game's netcode do.

            • reply
              January 28, 2025 10:37 AM

              It's been about 50/50 for me so far. Half have been fine, half have been bad. I've just had to decline rematches in the bad fights.

              Sega does have a bug reporting system setup, on their discord they are actively reading feedback about the netcode. So I'm hoping it improves more in the coming weeks

      • reply
        January 28, 2025 10:02 AM

        Yeah this is unfortunate. I was down to put a lil time in but not if the online experience is going to be frustrating as hell.

    • reply
      January 28, 2025 3:58 PM

      Wait. This is the 4th version of VF5? Like just remakes of the same game? I haven't really followed VF since 3 and haven't really played since 2.

      • reply
        January 28, 2025 5:45 PM

        Correct. There was Virtua Fighter 5, Virtua Fighter 5 Final Showdown, Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown, and this one: Virtua Fighter 5 REVO.

        I suspect like EnhancedInterrogator said, it's a test bed for the rollback netcode they'll likely try to bring to Virtua Fighter 6. Good thing too, because I don't think it's where it needs to be yet.

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