King of Fighters XII Review

SNK made a smart move by halting its yearly King of Fighters release schedule and going with a straight numbering system starting with Kof XI. In the years since that release, the developer went back to the drawing board, scrapped all of the recycled art, and created all new character art and background stages. While XII looks better than ever, the strict focus on art has left the rest of the game feeling extremely bare bones.

King of Fighters XII has no story outside of some poorly voiced anime news reports. I'm not claiming that other fighting game stories are complete masterworks, but when even a ridiculous plot is missing it feels strange. You don't get a custom ending for each character, so there is no motivation for going back through the career multiple times – even though the career rarely takes more than 10 minutes to complete.

Teams of three characters battle against each other until one side is completely beaten down, but you can't swap out fighters on the fly. The fight halts once you knock out one of your opponents; you get back a little health and then fight the next character on the team. Problem is, there's a slight yet noticeable load whenever a new fighter enters the ring, and it gets annoying fast. In XII's career you fight five of these teams of three, primarily because there are only five different backgrounds (and two of them are night and day versions of the same place).

Despite these complaints, Kof XII is a solid fighting game at its core. Even though it's a large drop from previous rosters, the 22 characters provide more than enough combat variety. Even with console exclusive characters Mature and Elisabeth added in, there aren't a whole lot of women in the cast. Nonetheless, all of the archetypes are there, from the strong and slow to the weak and agile, and ranged versus close quarters brawlers.

The new clash system blows both fighters back when they strike simultaneously with the same move, which creates a tense rock, paper, scissors moment at the beginning of matches and can be used to push away an aggressive opponent. New critical counters allow players to execute a quick combo out of a hard punch or kick counter once the gauge is full. You don't really realize it's there at first, but once you learn the technique, it can give you the upper hand. Super moves are powerful enough without feeling cheap since it's possible to dodge them once you know what to expect from certain combatants.

The fighters look nice in motion, and the special move effects dazzle, but I wish SNK ditched the pixilated look for more clean lines. You can tinker with a series of filters to attempt to smooth out the blocks, but it makes the characters feel out of focus more than offering much of an improvement. But maybe others will appreciate the more retro look.

Online multiplayer offers the most in this package. Up to eight-player lobbies create the atmosphere of arcades as two players battle and everyone else spectates, laying down smack talk the whole time over voice chat. Once the match is over, another player rotates in until everyone gets a chance. Sure, you can simply search for a random fight against another player and get right down to business, but I enjoyed the group dynamic. Team battles pit three players against three players on another team. The only possible downside is that if your first player is really awesome and takes down the three other players, you don't really get a turn. But your side won anyway, so who cares? We did experience some lag in our online tests, so be sure to keep away from shoddily connected players.

In the end, the sparse content maims Kof XII. Next time around there better be more stages, characters, modes – more everything. You can't just rip the five-minute-per-play arcade code straight to consoles and expect people to invest the full $60 over a few coins.