King of Fighters XII Review (360)

Before I start talking about SNKs King of Fighters XII, I’d like to share a little bit of history about me and fighting games. To be honest, fighting games have never been my first love. Sure I liked playing IK+ and Body Blows on the Amiga, but then I never really got what was so good about Street Fighter II on the SNES, which everyone loved so much. But then in 1995 Sony launched the PS1 with Tekken as one of the first games available. I loved it. Played it all the time. Completed it and then traded it for Tekken II some months later and subsequently played that to death.

But then I just got bored of fighting games, and moved onto other genres, particularly racing games. So I thought it was about time to see if I’d been missing anything in the meantime with King of Fighters XII. Unfortunately, as it turned out I hadn’t.

I know that many people have been waiting for this game for some time. It was a very popular series of games on the Neo-Geo, which it must have been since this is number 12! Also I’d been hearing about the oodles of time that SNK had spent hand drawing all the characters, so I expected so much more from what is a fairly basic fighting game.

Visually the graphics look terrible on a big LCD TV. I was playing this on 1080p setting on a Toshiba 46 inch LCD, and to be honest I wish I wasn’t. It was like plugging in the Wii with the component cable, looking at the screen (aaaggh, the horrible graphics) and plugging the scart cable back in (mmm, better looking fuzzy graphics). I thought I was playing an Xbox Live Arcade game from the early 90’s. Everywhere you look your eyes are assaulted by nasty looking pixelation. I honestly thought that I’d missed a setting when loading the game as the screenshots I’d seen and even the ones I’ve used on this post, don’t really show just how rough the graphics look. Seeing as everything on the screen (backgrounds etc) is hand drawn, there is no escaping the pixelation.

However, there are some nice touches amongst all this graphical carnage, mainly centred around each characters individual moves. Many of them just look really good, very smooth and well, hand drawn. So hats off to the SNK animators and all their hard work. Oh, hang on I’d forgotten about the huge wrestler character “Raiden”, there is nothing redeeming about him what-so-ever. He looks terrible. Bad, bad, bad, bad, bad artists.

The next thing to assault my senses shortly after the grpahics was the game sound. Aggghhhh. After playing precisely 3 rounds I quit the game, found the SFX options and muted the in game music. What on earth possessed SNK to include such terrible music in this game I really don’t know. Were they trying to make you angry so you’d enjoy beating up the other characters. TAG top tip: Do not play this game with the in game sound enabled using a home cinema system, your ears will bleed.

Ok, so what about the fighting action. Well, when it comes to the battles they are fun while they last. Standard fighting game set-up really. Choose up to 3 characters in your team and go fight. The gameplay does lean heavily towards combination fighting, rather than 1 punch and a kick here and there. So I did get to experience some pretty spectacular combination action, usually from the console kicking my ass.

You do have new moves available in this version namely, guard attack (escape being trapped), emergency evasion (run away), blow back attack (anti-special move) and critical counter (special attack). Of these I had all sorts of trouble activating my characters critical counter move. Fortunately, SNK have included a n0ob’s setting allowing for easy special attack critical counter activation. Yay, for easy activation.

The arcade mode is a bit limited in that you only play five 3 round fights and that’s it. No boss battle or anything. That’s a bit cheap SNK don’t you think? Ok, there is a practice mode and a gallery, but very little else. Also when playing 2-player against Weefz, it was about as awkward as Resident Evil 5 (just try playing it with 2 players, annoying as hell) to set up. The menu system was just not intuitive when you throw 2 controllers into the mix. Come on developers, it’s not that hard to let the 2 players select their characters at the same time! And yes, there is online multiplayer available too.

In summary:

Average fighting game, with terrible music and few gameplay options. Recommended only to fans of the series and those without big screen LCDs!

Screenshots:

King of Fighters XII is out on the 25th Sep 09 for Xbox 360 and PS3.