Capcom Fighting Evolution (aka Capcom Fighting Jam in Japan) has the dubious honour of being perhaps the company’s most mediocre fighting game.

While true that they have released several worse - games where they were so enamoured by a particular concept or franchise that they were blinded to its incumbencies - these games at least have that unusual, novelty collectible appeal about them. Lacking even that CFE sits there, squat and unlovely. It’s a game slapped together with no love, no real effort and next to no awareness of its own awesome legacy.As such it is ideal fodder for online conspiracy theorists. With the departure of several long-standing Capcom staffers, including those most responsible for the Street Fighter games; the rumours of CFE being their last ever 2D fighter as well as the rights to SF going over to Capcom USA it’s easy to piece these things together and come up with the impression of a company indebted to a legacy it has neither the desire nor skill to uphold, one with precious little value or relevancy in today’s gaming climate.CFE is a depressing disappointment through and through. While not a complete and total failure the game brings practically nothing new to the table whatsoever, delivers no new ideas or scenarios, modes or options and totally sets the world alight by delivering an astonishing ONE new character.Utterly plotless and without reason, the game pits a selection of characters from five different Capcom fighting games - Street Fighter 2, Street Fighter III, Street Fighter Alpha, Darkstalkers and RED EARTH - against each other, for the chance to go up against the godly ethereal Pyron (also from Darkstalkers) for no apparent reason whatsoever.

The Street Fighters are a fairly predictable selection - Ryu (but not Ken), Zangief, Bison and Guile from SF2, Karin, Sakura, Guy and Rose from Alpha and Yun, Chun-Li, Urien and Alex from SFIII.The Darkstalkers are equally familiar. Demetri, Jedah, Felicia and Anakaris, plus last boss Pyron. Mercifully the ubiquitous Morrigan, her sprite the fighting game equivalent of the McDonald’s logo, is nowhere to be seen.The other group of characters come from Red Earth. If you’re wondering what on earth that is then you’re probably not alone. Released in Japan as Warzard it was the first game to be released on Capcom’s CPS3 hardware, as something of a showcase for the new technology. A fantasy-themed fighting/RPG crossbreed that sank without a trace and was never ported to any console it remains destined to wallow in obscurity for the rest of time, aside from a two-week period of vague interest when it gets emulated, a few years down the line. It is worth nothing that Tessa/Tabasa, playable in Capcom’s own comedic jewel-themed Pocket Fighter and SNK Playmore’s SNK vs Capcom: CHAOS also hailed from this game.It has to be said that the inclusion of the four Red Earth characters does add a little appeal, as most players will have never even seen, let alone actually used them. They form an interesting quartet - Murkuro, or Kenji in the West (it seems the game suffers from more “Bison/Vega” stupidity) is an effortlessly cool ninja, wielding ‘kunai’ knives, a chain with a hook at the end of it and, bizarrely, a huge cannon. He does it all - the two-finger posing, the long wavy scarf, the *chik* of his short sword being resheathed - his unoriginality is dwarfed by his, let’s be honest, utter coolness. He’s a tricky character to use, though - being somewhat weak and awkward, more suited for ‘keepaway’ play - running and hiding and poking from a safe distance - than full-on offence.

Far more straightforward is Leo, the Lion (Tony the Tiger is a secret boss). This beefy, Lion-headed barbarian character wields a sword and shield and attacks with dashing multi-hit headbutts, elemental sword swipes and a rather silly-looking Spinning Piledriver. He’s actually ever so limited, a beginner character if ever there was one.

The other two characters are, ah, slightly less impressive. Hydron (neé “Nool”) is a huge Sea Nautilus with a pitchfork, his tentacles spilling out and forming a constantly shifting body. Attacking with said tentacles, his Poseidon-esque pitchfork, tiny baby squids that die and ascend to heaven with halos if they hit (no, really) miniature typhoons and a couple of spinning body checks, he is a very silly character indeed.

Then there’s Hauzer, the giant dinosaur. Resembling a Tyrannosaurus Rex with funny horn ornaments and little fins on his back, and filling practically the entire vertical screen, Hauzer is an enormous, slow and awkward character. Able to charge, spit a falling gob of molten rock and leap skywards in a manner disturbingly similar to Sauron in Atari’s horrible Primal Rage, he is a character only for the very patient (and the easily amused).

While nice to see some of the lesser-known RE characters, I would have much preferred to see the more human, interesting and, yes, attractive characters make the cut. Tao (AKA Mai-Ling) looks cool, and everybody loves Tasaba, witchy little minx she is.

Nonetheless these four characters, resplendent in their (slightly cut down) CPS3 animated detailed glory are a welcome addition, and serve to hint a little at how RE actually played. These characters, with their levels, their complicated setups and slow, elaborate attack sequences suggest a slow-paced, complex yet spectacular and elaborately detailed fighter, the obscurity of which now more of a shame than ever.

There are two other characters in the game. The first, in his now traditional ‘hidden boss’ role is “Shin Akuma” - basically the CvS2 Orochi hybrid incarnation with some added abilities tossed in for flavouring.

The second is Ingrid, lone all-new character and sub-par-sub-boss. Ingrid was originally to star in Capcom’s ill-fated 3D venture Capcom Fighting All-Stars - its cancellation perhaps the catalyst for the creation of CFE. A white-haired, red-eyed Athena-like, Ingrid is the (unwilling) minion of a un-named god and tosses beams, blasts and balls of golden electrical energy and rolls and counterattacks like an SNK character while her Japanese vocal theme song warbles pleasingly in the background. Fun to play, and initially a challenge to beat, Ingrid is let down by her derivative (and kind of suspect) appearance, general lack of any sort of interesting personality and huge irritation factor.

Now for a game such as this, containing characters from more than a decade of Capcom fighting games spanning three different arcade boards and several different art styles, you would expect there to have been some pretty major redraws so all the sprites fit together, right?

Wrong.

In what is by far the most controversial aspect of the game - Capcom have taken the easiest route possible and just tossed all the different sprite sets together with little, if any retouching work.

The results are, frankly, shit.

Ten year-old flat-shaded, heavily outlined Darkstalkers characters mingle freely with gradiated CvS characters while simplistically animated SFA characters trade blows with the elaborately-rendered cast of SFIII. Any sense of coherency, of a single present theme or style are torpedoed out of the water instantly.

And it’s not just clashes of style - there are basic artistic screwups here that could have been fixed with five minutes in Photoshop. The blue, aura-like glow around Sakura’s head is particularly bad, and Demitri - his sprite stretched to ensure he matches the rest of the cast proportion-wise is a pixelly, poorly-formed mass that Capcom should be ashamed of.

Questionable respect for the paying audience and devotion to the job aside, this mix & match extravaganza creates, in terms of plot and ‘feel’ an utter sense of detachment. While the cut/paste characters in the Capcom vs SNK games did lessen the games’ coherency, there were things to balance it out - intros, poses, cutscenes, that sort of thing. Here there is no common thread to tie things together, everyone seems almost superimposed, totally unaware of where they are, who they’re fighting.

The chance of some epic fan-fap match-ups is blown, utterly. I’ve always wanted to see Alex go up against Zangief, and now I can, but who cares when the big Z is more pixelated than an 80’s music video? Any romantic, high-concept ideas of classic characters clashing evaporate instantly in the blocky, poorly-resized mess. There’s the sensation that the people who made this didn’t really know who the characters were, or why they were popular. It’s really all so very mechanical, as much as I hate talking about a videogame as if it were a lapsed Catholic, it just doesn’t have any soul to it. There’s no sensation whatsoever at any point that this game was created with love, that anyone worked hard, or cared passionately about what they were making and tried to make it the best they could do. It’s by-the-numbers, factory-pressed mush of the most hateful kind.

And again, like this years’ other ‘big’ Capcom release, Hyper Street Fighter 2, there’s less a sense of celebrating this epic gaming legend, and more being slightly embarrassed by it all.

The backgrounds these patchwork characters fight on are similarly unimpressive. Flat, lifeless and totally uncreative and with no nifty scaled floors, or parallax scrolling they are presumably intended to recreate classic places, moods and concepts from Capcom fighters but manage not a tenth of of their vibrancy, style and imagination. The stages are packed with cameos, although I don’t quite understand the point of doing so. Are we supposed to be amused, or pleased because two-frame Sean is standing near two-frame Ken and three-frame Honda? What springs to my mind is less “oh look it’s ___” and more “why is ___ in the background and not playable? He’s much better than Hydron!”

Like the CvS games the impact sparks and projectiles are transparent, polygonal or whatever it is, and just like CvS they don’t really work, seeming indistinct, superimposed and apart from the action in a way that the classic hit sparks and lovingly rendered Hadoukens (look it’s some hands!) in pre-NAOMI Capcom fighters never were. The shockwaves from a fallen character and the block impact fields are also done in this funny, and quintessentially non-sprite way, and only serve to stand out even more against the ancient sprite works.

Furthermore I question the wisdom behind making the hit sparks in CFE so gigantic - it doesn’t make the characters look better, nor the action more exciting, and some of them, such as those accompanying Alex’s Stun-Gun Headbutt literally fill the entire screen, and go beyond annoying and well into the realm of the stupid. Is it to hide something, perhaps? Admittedly the super combo finish sunburst effects are nice, a different one for each ‘groove’, as are the differing ’super startup’ effects - but they’re scarce recompense for the horrors visited on poor defenceless players.

The character art is also of note - big, high-resolution images capturing admirably the sense of the characters, again unfortunate that the rest of the game’s art counts so much against it.

CFE is sonically forgettable, although never especially painful, with electronic beats and guitar wails driving the action along quite nicely and accompanied by some suitably meaty hit effects (”pthquack!”) The only musical reference to the older games is the way each characters’ original theme song can be unlocked and added to the sound test, and to the game itself once every track is unlocked. This of course does nothing really but remind anyone who hears them of how great all those classic Capcom themes were - from a time when they rose up against hardware limitations and created memorable, catchy, proper THEME TUNES full of 90’s Japanese videogame cool, the way they haven’t been able to since (sorry) 1997.

But while CFE is an aesthetic disappointment, its lineage cannot be extinguished no matter how hard they seem to try. Just as cut and paste as the visuals, the game itself is a mish-mash of different styles tossed together to form a game that while unoriginal, maintains enough of that classic feel - that solid, weighty, precise and satisfying fisticuffal interaction.

It appears to be based largely on the CvS2 engine, with the same sort of physics and largely identical rules with regards to combo timing and hit properties, juggles and collisions, plus the return of, er, the CvS2 pause and training menu which is very strange. In a nod to SFIII throws are now performed, universally, with Jab + Short, and of course game-specific functions refer to the games in question. I’m personally not a huge fan of this ‘CvS’ feel - the games have never felt quite as precise, weighty or finely-tuned as the ‘real’ SF games - but they’re certainly still good enough to engage and challenge.

The big ‘innovation’ of the game is the team aspect. Not ordered like KOF nor tag-team like the VS games, CFE sees the player choose two characters, and after the end of the first round, the option to switch between them flashes up, much as it did in Capcom’s Rival Schools games. This adds a further dimension to the normal character-counter-character dynamic - plus extends the scope of the characters - are they good as fighters, or as ‘batteries’ for charging super meter? While it doesn’t embrace the team format as fiercely as something like MvC2, it’s still brings something that hasn’t really been done before in a game such as this, and as such is worth clinging to.

Now each of the aforementioned five representative game types has their own unique rules, roughly representing the game they come from.

“SF2″ characters deal the most damage, but cannot air block, nor possess any added mobility or combat options. They also possess a single super meter (although still have access to multiple supers, plus moves and commands from later games such as CvS.)

The “SFIII” characters can dash, parry, high-jump, quick getup, do universal overheads, EX moves and super cancels. Unlike in their parent game, the III characters have access to all of their super moves at once - on a two-level meter. If you’ve ever wanted to see Alex do a Stun Gun Headbutt followed by a Hyper Bomb, without System Direction, now’s your chance!
These characters seem to be based almost wholly on their 3rd Strike incarnations, the only omission I can see is the lack of Alex’s HCB+K Spiral DDT.

Characters from the “SFA” games can Alpha Counter, use ground roll recoveries, Custom Combos and air block, plus have access to single-level super combos. The CCs are more like the CvS2/A2 versions than the slower-trailing shadow hits of SFA3’s V-ISM, although there are still simple-yet-powerful sequences that can be performed with perhaps a little too ease.

Red Earth characters can airblock, high jump and pounce attack, as well as “level up” - pressing Strong and Forward together at the cost of one level of existing meter regains a small amount of health, increases damage done and for certain characters allow allows access to lvl 2 and 3-only supers. RE characters can also perform the ‘Ultimate Guard’ - Fierce and Roundhouse together for a tricky-to-time faultless block that can be followed up with a specific command for a punch or kick countermove.

The Darkstalkers can chain combo, air block, pounce and perform ES and EX moves. They are by far the fastest, but to balance it out do the least damage.

And while last boss Pyron also obeys DS rules, the other two ‘boss’ characters have their own custom grooves. Ingrid can roll, super jump, air block and has three levels of super meter, while Shin Akuma can do pretty much everything, ever. All at once. He is a crazy love machine, and only his lower-than-usual stamina (hysterically low when he becomes playable) stops him from being quite upsetting.

Now while these different ‘grooves’ add variety to the play experience, there’s also the sense that they’re stilting things. Unlike Capcom vs SNK 2 where the grooves were selectable, creating essentially six versions of each character each with specific advantages and disadvantages depending on their own attributes, which increased the depth and scope of the game nicely, here the grooves are fixed. There is ONLY classic Ryu, ONLY SFIII Alex and so on. While such options are not essential to a 2D fighter, they would be most welcome in such a mire of overfamiliarity as this one. I want a Ryu that can dash, to chain combo with Zangief, to level up with Felicia. It’s doubly frustrating as the character definitions are blurred already - “SF2″ Ryu has his Shin Shoryuken, M. Bison his Super Psycho Crusher, Zangief his stupid kick antiair throw super - considering this is a fighting ‘jam’ it would have been nice to have more variety in the character options. Indeed they could have gone crazy and added a heap of grooves from other Capcom games. Come on, who wouldn’t want to select Alex in STAR GLADIATOR-groove, or Akuma in POCKET FIGHTER mode?

There have been changes made to the characters - both in the realms of accommodating them to the engine, and general tweaks and adjustments, sometimes for the sake of fixing imbalances or bugs from past games. Sadly none of them really rank any higher than “c. Strong now cancellable” or something similar, which, and let’s be honest here, is hardly a game-selling feature. Although I’d like to see them try it.

Any extras? Training mode, vs mode, unlockable classic soundtracks and playable boss characters is all there is. While there are no story-based endings (naturally) - a small spark of interest is generated by the comic-framed images that appear after each character has beaten Pyron - images drawn by the UDON team, those responsible for the excellent Street Fighter and Darkstralkers comics. While largely pointless, they are drawn superbly and are frequently awesome in that they do really seem to “get” the characters. There are also plenty of cameos packed in (Jedah’s one is great) to spot as well.

I think one of the game’s most disturbing aspects is the way it really brings out a creepy, sneaking apologist side to anyone who tries to defend it. While every fighting game requires a little self-stroking, here you really need to go into overdrive to sell the thing. And worst of all, I find myself doing it more and more all the time. It’s not bad this, it could have been worse that. “It’s better than nothing” and the worst thing is, it actually works!

Are we really so sad and desperate? Have we really waited all these years just to be able to cancel Karin’s c. Forward, or combo in a corner (at long last!) Guy’s QCF + Roundhouse?

Why, yes, we have!

Despite all the problems there is still something about getting another shot at these classic characters, even in such random and uninspirited circumstances that is slyly appealing. It is pleasing to see that the good old characters, from as long as five whole years ago (!) have lost none of their charm, nor that the desire to learn, improve and absorb knowledge whilst playing a Capcom fighter is as strong as ever.

But it’s still not enough. To call the thing “Evolution” at all is borderline offensive. At least “Jam” gives the impression of a crazed, nonsensical free-for-all, that’s at least vaguely appropriate. The only thing CFE has evolved is Capcom’s bad reputation. God it makes me feel so sad!

CFE feels like budget release. The lack of options and modes and extras, which while never a replacement for honest-to-goodness playability and smart design, really hurt here. The least they could have done is paper over the faults with a ton of extras and secrets and pretty pictures looking back at the legacy of the five games represented here. As it stands there’s just so little new that hasn’t been seen and done before - the simple truth is that there just isn’t nearly enough new things to see and do to really impress. There’s only so many times one can call it ’solid’ with ‘classic’ gameplay before you realise you’re actually praising the games CFE is a composite of, games from often a decade or more ago rather than this supposedly ‘new’ fighter itself.

Can I recommend it, ultimately? Cautiously yes. Like it or not, gameplay takes precedence over sprites, backgrounds and ‘effort’ and that is the one area where CFE succeeds. If you can get over the crummy compositions, cameos and deja vu, plus the sense of dryness and lack of any real personality then there is most certainly a time-consuming and even (gosh) sometimes satisfying fight to be fought.

It is still depressing though, that Capcom are now making games that are just bits of their old classics chopped up and repackaged. They’ve always had a reputation as the masters of rehashes, but back then you could count on it being the build-up to something incredible; be it 3rd Strike, Super Turbo or, er, Alpha 3. Here there’s no such goal, just a paint-by-numbers Mona Lisa that only a wistfully teary-eyed SF nostalgic could ever even hope to truly love.

And while SNK are still doing things, Arc Systems are showing no sign of slowing down and the 3D fighters seem to go from strength to strength, Capcom’s apparent fall from grace is still sad enough to make any fighting game fan sigh mournfully. I can only hope that the internal shiftings, rights transferences and other miscellaneous chicanery will lead to something more positive, it would be a terrible shame to see them go out this way.

• Publisher/Developer: Capcom
• Score: 71%