King of Fighters has always played second fiddle to Street Fighter, at least in the west. Still every arcade in my city still has a KOF98 cabinet while its contemporaries are nowhere to be seen so I guess Capcom can suck on SNK’s flakey nut sack.
The series has a place in most hardcore gamer’s hearts and so, after the revival of the Street Fighter series earlier this year, it is no surprise that SNK have upped there game for the twelveth 2d entry in the KOF series.
In a kind of SNK does what Capcan’t fashion, the newest entry is 100% 2D. No polygons here. Every frame of animation has been painstakingly hand drawn and rendered in HD. In action, the game looks beautiful and the good people at SNK Playmore let the staff of ForwardSlashAwesome (and whoever the fuck else decided to show up) have a good two minutes of playtime with one of the test builds.
For those new to the series, King of Fighters combines characters from all of SNK’s other series into one fighting game. Since the majority of SNK’s other series are fighting games it has always had a very natural and organic feel. KOF pits teams of three against each other rather than strictly one against another with the match only reaching conclusion when all three team members drop. The home version of the game will feature twenty six characters, one of the lowest the series has seen, featuring characters from Fatal Fury, Art of Fighting, Ikari as well as many others developed specifically for the series.No Mai though... where's the sex appeal?
After being reassured by the company rep several times that we were only playing a test build and that the final version would be much different, we were released into the KOF world.
After selecting the available characters, it became apparent why we were given such a blatant warning: The load times in this build of the game are obscene. They aren’t just terrible or unacceptable, after sitting through these load times you literally feel sick to your stomach. I had enough time to film the load screen, walk over to another booth, chat to a colleague and return before the match loaded. We were assured that these would not be in the final build of the game, so we can only pray that that is true.
When the match began however it seemed to all handle like a dream, we got to demo series favourite Kim, the Korean TaeKwonDo expert, SNK’s pseudo mascot, Athena and series veteran Clark Still who recently appeared in Metal Slug 7, word up Clark.
All the characters handled pretty much as they did in previous versions but now in glorious HD. All their moves have been admirably converted from the dodgy pixilated mess SNK had been using since ’99 into fluid beautiful chains giving even the simplest quarter-roll punch move a fantastic feeling of satisfaction.
It’s not all just cosmetic buffs though, KOFXII seemed to add a new mechanic where if two attacks of equal strength are made by opposing characters at the same time, then the characters would repel each other, undamaged. On top of that Guard Breaks make a return as well as leader supers.
All in all it felt very much like previous KOF titles, and that is not a bad thing. If you are looking for the brilliant depth of SFIII or the recently re-released Mark of the Wolves then KOFXII will be right up your alley.
Curiously, the version which we played showed each of the characters composed of, what looked like, giant pixels. I assumed this was some kind of reference to the retro feel of the earlier games as it still looked kind of cool however the rep assured me it would not be in the final version.
While it had already been announced by SNK, the rep confirmed that there would be no story to this version of KOF acting more like a Dream match up title. The representative stated that (of course) future KOF installments are on the cards and will tie up the lose story threads from previous games.
All in all KOFXII looked fantastic but doesn’t seem to be bringing much new to table aside from a paint job. With only Arcade and Online modes confirmed and a lower character roster, hardcore gamers will likely be a bit disappointed considering the amazingly deep home release that was KOFXI however the new art style and iconic figures may finally break the series into the Western mass market. All the details of the game’s release have yet to be confirmed so we will just have to wait and see whether this entry in the series rises to be king… cheesy right?
NA release is on the 20th of July while the EU version will appear whenever the publishers get around to it.
