King of Fighters XII Review

"The future is now" SNK? Oh man if this is the future you had in mind then I want no part of it. This is yet another review I had written up for a long time yet didn't publish for two distinct reasons. The first reason was because I planned on doing a BlazBlue vs. King of Fighters XII comparison and essentially review both titles at the same time since they both literally released within weeks of one another. The second reason was I wanted to hold out and see if SNK would fix the atrocious online mode. By this point if it hasn't been fixed I seriously doubt that it will ever be up to par and BlazBlue pretty much trumps KOF XII in literally every category effectively negating any need for a comparison type review. However, I will still give KOF XII a standalone review because quite frankly I'm angry that I lost $60 and I feel compelled to state the reasons exactly why I think this is a terrible game and I wasted my money and stuff on a stupid blog as if SNK would care about my opinion or something.

King of Fighters XII has to be one of the few games that has actually angered me upon my purchase. I’ve bought worse games over the years of course, but KOF XII is one of those rare times where I’ve actually become physically frustrated with the developers and everyone involved with its release because SNK can do better and quite frankly the KOF franchise deserves better. This game is an absolute slap in the face to anyone who has ever followed the series for any length of time. Actually, the KOF franchise hasn’t been the level of quality it once was in the 90s, but all the same none of the newer releases displayed such a level of sheer ineptitude and laziness as this title either. This game has no business being called King of Fighters.

Presentation wise, at first, the game looks okay. They have gone and finally re-drawn the sprites and initially everything looks great. Unfortunately the sprites look very pixilated on a HD screen, even with the smoothing filter option cranked to max. There is just no saving the sheer amount of pixilation. While most of the cast looks okay from the redesign, some characters look downright terrible. Ralf and Clark got not only bigger sprites, but bigger stomachs as well. Seriously, what did these guys eat to grow so huge? Athena Asamiya what did they do to you? She looks like a pink, anorexic bug. The character animations are decent, but not quite up to par with what they should be. Backgrounds aren’t much better, while they’re infinitely better animated than the characters themselves; there is entirely too much going on most of the time. The menus are boring and forgettable, much like the music. A much better choice would have been to give each character a theme from an older title that plays whenever that person jumps in a la Marvel vs. Capcom simply due to the lack of not only forgettable tracks, but very little tracks, period.

From this....

...to this.

Thus do we come to the next problem regarding KOF XII.; the lack of everything. This game offers very little modes and features and gives players only the most barebones of options. The game only includes 22 characters and some character exclusions are head scratching. (Mai Shiranui, K’) This would be fine if the game offered something. Give us a story mode, or at least more stages or more gameplay modes. You know, something to justify the $60 price tag. There is an Arcade mode where you can replay to try to get the best time possible by playing through a whopping five stages with no bosses. There isn’t even an option to do a single player run in Arcade mode. Amazing! Seriously, guys, would a Survival Mode have been asking too much? Other than that, there’s a Versus mode which contains the same amount of whopping five stages and a Training mode and of course, online.

It’s time to kick the dead horse, kids. Yes, the online is atrocious. Purchase the game and players will find themselves already having to download a near hour long patch just to work out some of the kinks with the online. While the patch helps somewhat, the online is still a horrible laggy mess. The fact that a patch was released only a few days after launch is indicative of the fact that SNK released an unpolished, unfinished mess of a game that has no business having a $60 price tag attached to it. Ultimately, that’s just one example of the real issue with KOF XII. It’s not so much what the designers didn’t include, honestly, I knew that this game had very little modes and stages; it’s more or less what little they did include isn’t even acceptable. The gameplay, while not horrible, isn’t even up to par with past titles. The gains and improvements made to previous installments were promptly ignored by the developers. Many characters have had moves taken away for some inexplicable reason. The ability to switch members in the battle is gone. Why make so many improvements in the gameplay over the years and utterly ignore them in the newest installment? The A.I. is broken and stupid. Even on the hardest difficulty often times they play like button mashing newbie. Many times the computer falls for the same moves over and over from the player. I’ve literally won matches by using the same move throughout.

How in the world could SNK charge full retail price for a game this unpolished and unfinished? SNK will have to do better than this if they want to enjoy further success with this franchise. There is absolutely nothing here of merit. The only positive marks I can give it is that the gameplay is actually okay if you play versus mode locally with a friend. But even with that praise, past KOF titles are vastly superior in that regard anyway and a bit lighter on your wallet as well. There is absolutely no reason to purchase this game. Let it waste away in obscurity in the bargain bin and spend your $60 elsewhere. SNK has not earned it with this one.