Evercade Alpha review: A beautiful bartop arcade that brings hot-swap to coin-op, with caveats

The world of bartop arcade machines can be a pretty expensive one if you want more than a couple of games to choose from.

Most of the popular products available these days offer either a single game or a small collection of games from the same series, in the hope that players will buy a bunch of different ones to create their own mini arcade.

Of course, not everybody has the disposable income or the space in their house to buy multiple arcade cabinets, even if they are much smaller than the originals, meaning the hobby is an extremely niche one.

Blaze Entertainment, maker of the Evercade line of retro gaming systems, may have come up with the solution, and by and large we love the result, even though it’s not entirely without its own issues.

Evercade Alpha is a bartop arcade cabinet which not only offers a selection of games like some of its competitors, but also features support for Evercade’s growing line of retro multi-game cartridges (of which there are currently more than 60, offering more than 550 games in total).

In this way, players theoretically only need to buy one Evercade Alpha, safe in the knowledge that they can continue to add new games to it as new cartridges are released. That’s the theory, at least.

The Alpha itself is an impressive piece of kit. Standing at just under a foot and a half tall, it’s made of sturdy materials and has a great glossy finish (though good luck peeling the protective film off yours when you first get it – we had to get the screwdriver out and loosen the cabinet to get the bits of film that had been lodged in the folds).

We were sent the Deluxe Edition to review, which upgrades the standard edition’s controls with a Sanwa arcade stick and buttons. We therefore can’t comment on the quality of the standard edition, but the Deluxe sticks and buttons feel superb to use (and the cabinet can be opened up fairly easily to install your own controls should you so desire).

The 8” IPS screen is also nice and bright, with a sharp image. Given that it runs Evercade’s software you get access to the usual screen resizing, scanline and border options that you would in the company’s other devices (and most other emulated retro game compilations).

There are currently two versions of the Evercade Alpha, each featuring six Capcom games. One is heavily Street Fighter themed and contains Street Fighter II Champion Edition, Super Street Fighter II Turbo, Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo and Street Fighter Alpha 1-3.

If you’re not much of a fighting game buff, the other Alpha features a more diverse range of games, offering Mega Man: The Power Battle, Mega Man 2: The Power Fighters, Carrier Air Wing, Final Fight, Knights of the Round and Strider.

The Deluxe Edition of each comes with six swappable marquees, allowing you to swap out the game logo at the top of the cabinet (which lights up as you play) with another one. The standard version still has swappable marquees, but only three.

As well as the included games there’s that unique selling point we already mentioned – two cartridge slots at the bottom of the Alpha where you can plug in one or two Evercade cartridges, gaining you access to more games beyond the six included.

While it’s absolutely not a fault, there’s a part of us that refuses to accept some of the Evercade games (such as Worms or the C64 collection) in arcade form, but that’s down to our own stubborn brain rather than any faults of the games themselves, and obviously it would be ridiculous to limit the device to only arcade-style games, so fair play to Blaze for not being as pedantic as us and implementing arbitrary restrictions.

As much as we love the Evercade Alpha, we do have some issues. The most glaring omission is the lack of DIP switch settings for the games on offer.

For those not in the know, dip switches were a set of switches on an arcade board that an operator could flick to change the game’s settings. It’s essentially a physical version of an options menu, allowing the game difficulty and other features to be set.

Many retro compilations which feature arcade games present the DIP switches to the player as a standard in-game options menu, allowing them to tweak the game to their liking. That’s not something that’s been available on any of Evercade’s arcade cartridges to date, and now that it has an actual physical arcade cabinet its absence is even more notable.

“Many retro compilations which feature arcade games present the DIP switches to the player as a standard in-game options menu, allowing them to tweak the game to their liking. That’s not something that’s been available on any of Evercade’s arcade cartridges to date, and now that it has an actual physical arcade cabinet its absence is even more notable.”

The reason it’s such an issue is that a lot of arcade games from the ‘80s and ‘90s were deliberately tuned to get as much money out of the player as possible, and as such their default difficulty level was often fairly high.

When five of the six games on offer in the Street Fighter cabinet are set to an above-average difficulty, players need to be pretty good at those games if they’re going to get the most enjoyment out of Evercade Alpha. Newcomers who try it out will get their backsides handed to them fairly quickly by the CPU, and with no option to make it easier (or even harder if you want even more of a challenge) they’re stuck with the default.

The most obviously affected is Super Street Fighter II Turbo, which is stuck on its Turbo 1 speed setting, with no way of slowing it down (or speeding it up). The result is a very fast, very difficult version of what should be the highlight of the package, but is instead the least playable unless you’re an absolute expert.

Luckily, the Alpha can connect to Wi-Fi and download system updates, so all is not entirely lost in that regard. We really hope the Alpha (and other Evercade devices) gets the option to mess with DIP switches in the future.

Our other issue is one far less likely to be solved with a download. The fact that there are two Evercade Alpha cabinets at launch, each with six different games, strikes us as creating a problem that we thought it was supposed to be solving.

When the whole gimmick is that you can play all your Evercade cartridges on your Alpha, it stands to reason that it should be a one-off hardware purchase. Instead, by splitting the Capcom games into two separate six-game cabinets instead of just bundling all 12 together in one, Blaze has set a precedent that tells players one of these £229 cabinets isn’t going to be enough for a full collection.

Indeed, last week it was announced that the company has done a deal with SNK to release officially licensed Neo-Geo products in 2025 and 2026, and we’d be stunned if we didn’t see more separate Evercade Alpha cabinets featuring the likes of The King of Fighters or Metal Slug collections.

We’re pleading with Blaze to put these Neo-Geo games on cartridges too (and both the Capcom collections), so we can still play everything on our Street Fighter Evercade Alpha instead of buying a new arcade machine every time. After all, the best thing about Alpha – and the main reason we’d still earnestly recommend it for now – is that you shouldn’t have to.