The King of Fighters XII

Capcom is often considered the best there is when it comes to 2D fighting games. The Street Fighter series with their innumerable iterations are still a fan favorite in just about all its variations. But back in the 90’s Capcom had a huge competitor in the arcades - NeoGeo SNK. These guys had fighting games that worked just as well as the Street Fighter games, only they had (arguably) better storylines, better innovation in camera zooming, and games that many thought, were more fun.

Unfortunately the 2000’s didn’t really go down well with NeoGeo SNK, with the company officially going bankrupt and then being picked up by Playmore just to port the same old games to new franchises. Now, with Ignition at the helm of porting the classic King of Fighter series to the new generation of consoles; could this be the second coming of the NeoGeo era? Simple answer - No.

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The King of Fighters XII was promoted as being the rebirth of The King of Fighters franchise. And when someone says rebirth, I automatically imagine the franchise getting a major facelift or some additional new features, or maybe improved gameplay mechanics while keeping the core of the game true to its original form. Super Street Fighter II Turbo HD Remix or Teeneage Mutant Ninja Turtles - Turtles in Time Re-Shelled are 2 great examples of that.

In The King of Fighters XII, the new thing is that the character sprites are now bigger than before, and their animations seem smoother than before. But if you compare that to any other 2D fighting game available today, they do look disappointingly dated. The background animates pretty well during the fight sequences, but there’s nothing that you’ve never seen before or seen done better.

It’s pretty obvious that the KOF-XII is meant to be a competitive fighting game, which is very clear with it’s barebones single player options. As single player, you can only play through the arcade mode, which consists of five 3-on-3 battles. As you can imagine, that gets over pretty fast, and the only other option you have is to start another set of 3-on-3 battles… wash, rinse, repeat.

The other two game modes are Versus, where you and a friend can play against each other locally; and Online, which is pretty much the same as versus, but only, well, online. Now the problem with playing the game online is that it suffers from some insane amount of lag, to the extent that the game is practically unplayable. Honestly, I can’t say that I tried too hard to get a good feel of online play. I gave up after going through multiple connectivity timeouts, and in the rare occasion, a battle that was determined more by luck than by skill.

The best way to enjoy this game is on local multiplayer mode. KOF-XII is very responsive with the PS3 controller. The fact that this is the only practical way I could play against someone, even if I lost, I knew I had only myself and not the technical difficulties to blame.

Frankly, The King of Fighters XII is at best a game that should have been downloadable at a budget price on the PSN and Xbox Live. Only the most hadcore King of Fighters fans may enjoy this ‘upgrade’, that too for a very limited period. This wasn’t a rebirth, this was another nail in The King of Fighters coffin!