Most of the characters included in the game are well balanced. But I couldn’t help but find that there are a few that are extremely weak and a few that are staggeringly strong. Kyo and Robert have an abundant arsenal of special moves that can ultimately end the fight in the right persons hands. Others like Mature and Clark have around 2 special moves. While all of this largely depends on the player it is still sad to see such unbalance in a fighting game coming off of my review of BlazBlue.
If you like a no frills fighting game with absolutely no story included…this game is for you. The game is great for the arcade, not necessarily at home. Sure the local multiplayer is great fun when your friends or family come over and you want to put a whooping on someone. If you plan to buy this game and challenge your friends from afar, you better make other plans for the time being. This game is riddled with online problems, even post patch. I am sure that there are some people out there that are not experiencing issues, but in every player match I have played I have experienced extreme lag. The game even paused at one point to buffer…how nice of it! The arcade mode included with the game is essentially a time trial mode. You fight through each round trying to beat SNK’s pre-set 59.99 sec leaderboard, which by the way is only for local play. The game features either 3 on 3 matches or 1 on 1 matches whether that be online or off.
There is a severe lack of overall features in this game as well. There are only 6 stages to choose from, 2 of which are night/day variations of each other. There is a single image gallery to unlock. There is one song for every stage you choose, which gets extremely repetitive. The menu is as basic as they come and the options even more so. There is even a lack of basic features, like when entering the character select screen…there is NO back button. There is no reset button for the Training mode and the main menu will load at odd times for seemingly nothing. It is very obvious that SNK main priority was the fighting and “re-birth” of all the character sprites. This is essentially an arcade game and honestly should have either stayed that way or ended up in the bargain bin. When it comes to the recent 2D fighters that have released, I would have to ultimately suggest either BlazBlue or Street Fighter IV for its replayability and superior online.
In conclusion, King of Fighters XII is essentially the weakest iteration in the series thus far. While the art and fighting were the obvious points that SNK focused all of their attention, it ultimately ended up in a very lackluster package of a game. Hopefully this release was more of a “test” to see how everyone would like the new character sprites and the “re-birth” of the series. For any of you that are able to get the online working no problem, there is a neat little app to show off your fighting skills around in your signatures, which can be found HERE. Ignition Entertainment would like to offer some tips for those having issues online.
While software update solutions are being devised, we can offer some tips to those users who are experiencing exceptionally poor online performance. First, we suggest limiting the number of players in a room to two, as the addition of a spectator with a slow connection can currently create latency for all users in the room. Also, if your Internet connection is configured behind a firewall using NAT Type 3, we recommend reconfiguring your setup to utilize NAT Type 1 (for PS3) or an “open” setting (for Xbox 360).
PlayStation LifeStyle’s Final Score
Absolutely no story, Lacks basic features Great hand-drawn sprites, Suffer from sub-HD resolutions Major balance issues and Horrible online lag that essentially kills the online mode for this game |
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