KOFXII is a one-on-one fighting game that lets you choose a team of three different characters to challenge your opponent’s team of three, and the game’s fundamental fighting mechanics are pretty sound. The game has a good variety of different abilities, strategies, and combination attacks, and the pace is good and brisk about as fast as that of more recent games in the series.

Beautiful Visuals

KOF XII has some of the well-animated and all-around gorgeous sprite art about. Each fighter is hand drawn and it’s a shame there are only 22 characters (the lowest of the KOF Series). If you want you can find out more about dot art here. The different stages have also been given lots of detail thrown at it with all sorts of classically SNK-flavoured nonsense taking place in the backgrounds.

But..

Despite all of the effort put into the visuals it seems they didn’t have time to play with the menus, a horrible blue background with a spinning logo and TIMES NEW ROMAN font EVERYWHERE, yuck.

Fight!

Every character in King of Fighters XII has a Light Punch, Heavy Punch, Light Kick and Heavy Kick. These four attacks make up your absolute basic move set and can be used to execute all the other advanced techniques found in the game. Pressing both Light Punch and Light Kick will make your fighter take evasive action (usually in the form of a roll) while hitting both punch buttons will execute a throw.

Hitting both heavy attacks together will perform a Blow Back attack, which will give your fighter some room to breathe. Alternatively, hitting these buttons while holding back on the D-pad (or joystick) will perform a Guard Attack, which parries an oncoming strike and automatically follows up with an attack of your own. 

Each character also has an assortment of special moves, which will be familiar to the fans of the series.  One of the new systems included is the Critical Counter system. Fill up a gauge during combat and, once filled, counter your opponent’s attack with a Heavy Punch or Heavy Kick while in the neutral position. This will activate a special combo state where you will be able to unleash hell on your opponent for a few seconds.

Apart from the Arcade mode there is a practice and area and a replay mode, but unfortunately there is no survival mode which would have been really good. Thankfully there is an online mode.

A patch has been released for the PS3 and xBox 360 to solve the online problems from when the game was released in the US, all of the matches I have played (and lost!) so far have been fun and I experienced no problems.

Conclusion

Despite the great visuals and sound fighting, this game feels a little unfinished and probably warranted a place on the xBox live Arcade rather than a £40 retail title. Fans of the series will feel most disappointed but if you are new to King of Fighters you will enjoy yourself.

7/10