Neo Geo Arcade 4 Review (Evercade)

You might assume that the fourth Neo Geo Arcade collection for Evercade is going to suffer from a lack of decent titles, but it's always worth noting that, despite its relatively small library of games, SNK's Neo Geo system has a surprisingly high number of great releases.

This cartridge proves that fact, and goes one better over the previous three collections by including eight rather than six games – making it even better value for money, especially when you consider how much these titles cost in their original form.

The personal highlight for me is Blazing Star, which is arguably the best shmup on the Neo Geo. While the CGI visuals haven't aged as gracefully as you'd like, the gameplay is stunning, with the full power of SNK's system being put to excellent use to flood the screen with bold, colourful sprites. The voice-over is slightly annoying, that's true, but it has a certain charm to it regardless. There's always one game on each Evercade pack which is worth the price of entry, and in my case, Blazing Star is that game.

There's also King of Fighters 2002, another polished entry in SNK's long-running team-based fighting series. This one was actually developed by Eolith as SNK had gone bankrupt by this point (the same company also co-created the previous year's entry), but that doesn't impact the quality of the game.

Gorgeous animation and deep gameplay mechanics make this another must-play – although you could argue that the existence of King of Fighters 2000 on Neo Geo Arcade 1 and King of Fighters '97 on Neo Geo Arcade 3 means this series is somewhat over-represented on Evercade now.

Speaking of familiar faces, Metal Slug 4 is this collection's run-and-gun classic, and despite different developers being involved, everything that makes the series so brilliant is present and correct, making this another essential play.

Moving on to the collection's more unique offerings, we have 3 Count Bout, a wrestling game with massive sprites and somewhat shallow gameplay. It's still good fun with two players, though, and some of the character designs are utterly timeless.

The same could be said of King of the Monsters, which is also a wrestling-style game but one in which you assume the role of massive 'kaiju' – and instead of a wrestling ring, cities are your battleground. While King of the Monsters was one of SNK's most popular early '90s coin-ops, it's a little too limited to keep you playing for very long.

Then we have Robo Army, a side-scrolling fighter with amazing visuals but quite basic gameplay. Back when it was first released, much was made of the massive sprites and smooth 2D scaling, but the sad fact is that there isn't enough meat on the bones to keep you playing for long – and brawlers like Streets of Rage 2 and Golden Axe put this to shame, even though they're running on weaker hardware.

That leaves us with Baseball Stars 2, a wonderful representation of the sport that, despite its arcade gameplay, is fantastic fun in both single- and two-player modes. Even if you couldn't care less about baseball itself, this remains solid fun and is one of the games you're probably going to come back to months down the line, especially if you can rope in a second player.