Developer: SNK Playmore
Publisher: Ignition Entertainment
Rating Guide: How I Review Games

Review:

The King of Fighters franchise has been around for a very long time.  I suppose seeing the XII (12) behind it was probably the first clue in realizing there is a long history of fans behind this series.  For a game to have 12 entries into its franchise, says something about how people have enjoyed it over the years.  But would it translate to a generation that has seen the likes of Street Fighter IV and Soulcalibur IV taking the fighting genre to new heights?

There was only one way to find out of course so I put on my fighter’s gloves and prepared to dig into The King of Fighters XII to see if this rebooting of the franchise worked.

Gameplay, Graphics and Sound

The King of Fighters XII makes no mistake about its intentions.  It wants to throw you into the fight quickly and give you as many combos and strikes as possible to destroy your opponent.   It has a really solid fighting engine to deliver on the goods but for some reason it was missing most of what I expected.  Call it depth if you will but it felt a bit dated.  When I first put the game in, I honestly thought that perhaps I had misplaced the real King of Fighters XII because it didn’t seem like a next-generation version of a storied franchise.  But I played on.

King of Fighters XII offers players a roster filled with classic SNK characters like Terry Bogard, Kim Kaphwan and Psycho Soldier’s own Athena Asamiya.  You can take these characters out for some 3-on-3 matches or single versus.  I wanted to be able to swap out my characters during a match but I couldn’t.  Only the strong survive so when one of your fighters is beaten, they’re eliminated from the match.  So you could literally be one versus three if you’re not any good.  

Every character is equipped with a mixture of Light/Heavy punches and Light/Heavy kicks.  They’re very basic moves that lead to other advanced techniques depending on your controller movements and directions.  Every character also has a range of special and super moves.  If you’re a King of Fighters veteran, this will be very familiar to you.  There are a few new things to the game including the Critical Counter system.  If you fill up a gauge during combat and counter your opponent’s attack with a heavy punch/kick, a special combo state where you can unleash on your opponent and chain crazy attacks together will be activated.

As I mentioned above, the basic battle system works but it just feels dated.  To have such good animations for your characters only to have them in a dull setting is disappointing.  I don’t suspect that hardcore King of Fighters fans will let this sway their love for the game though.  Although it’s not a perfectly polished entry on a next-generation system, it is a decent fighting game.  There are six stages to fight from and you can have a rather nice mixture of characters to use on them.  Unfortunately there aren’t any modes outside of Arcade and Multiplayer.

Visually, I’m not sure what to say about the game.  From a distance, the animations are great and the fighting is really fluid.  But up close, you get to see the game without its make-up on if you will.  There were several instances when I thought I was playing on my original Xbox.  Yes the pixelation made it seem like my HDTV had gone bad.  The soundtrack to the game doesn’t get any better so you might as well try to play with the music off.

Xbox LIVE Extras

You can jump on Xbox LIVE and test your fighting skills online with The King of Fighters XII.  I can tell you now that I unfortunately experienced quite a bit of lag with online multiplayer.  The game should be patched but it made even trying to fight nearly a pain to suffer through mostly.  I hope they get it fixed.  There’s really nothing much to online multiplayer as it’s simply the single player mechanic offered online.

I do hope the experience gets fixed because playing with friends online makes even a merely decent game a lot of fun.

Conclusion

If you have a buddy around the house or neighborhood, then King of Fighters XII should be a lot of fun to play even with the things it lacks.  The presentation falls short, online multiplayer is pretty weak and some of the graphical glitches take a lot away from the overall experience in King of Fighters XII.

Hardcore fans just might look past all of this but casual fans looking for a decent fighter might just opt for other fighting games on the shelves right now.