If you grew up in the 90s and played a fighter that was not Street Figther or Mortal Kombat, there’s a good chance it was one of SNK’s many classic 2D fighting franchises. Samurai Showdown, Art of Fighting, Fatal Fury, and of course the series that brings all of those and many more together, The King of Fighters (KoF). For a franchise that began over twenty years ago, and as someone who played those early games, it’s hard to not cheer for a triumphant return to a series that began to lose its luster and niche in the early 2000s. It’s too early to say if KoF XIV is a return to form that I so enjoyed in the late ’90s iterations, but my enjoyment of it and the excitement with the community is considerable to be sure.
KoF XIV has some great ‘bullet points’ going for it right off the bat — a huge roster, that’s all included in the retail release (no DLC hoops and delays to jump through here), topping over fifty characters. 3v3 fighting practically triples the level of depth and strategy required to become a skilled player, and also encourages experimentation on the part of the player in trying new characters or new arrangements for older characters. I’m hardly an expert here, and honestly I could not even name half of the roster in KoF XIV — but I have my go to favorites that I’ve used for many years now, including Joe Higashi, Kim, and actually my third player varies, but I’m starting to like Garcia from the Art of Fighting series. Mixing this trio up between battles adds a small, but palpable layer of freshness to each battle.
Getting skilled with one or two fighters is probably all most casual fighting fans ever achieve, so to be competitive in KoF, you do really have to put in the work. This caters to the hardcore fans just fine though, as that audience is used to purchasing fight sticks, doing tournaments (even if it’s just amongst local friends), and learning all of the intricate details for not only characters, but general gameplay mechanics too from jumping, countering, supers, and so forth. To that end, KoF XIV will keep any fighter, seasoned vet or noob, busy for quite a while. Trial and Practice modes help you hone your skills, but they’re not as detailed and helpful in my opinion as what I recently had in Guilty Gear Xrd Revelator a few months ago (best tutorial mode ever for a Japanese fighting game that I’ve experienced). A few feature called Rush allows even the most casual of gamers to perform cool combos, but the good news is, to make it really effective, you have to still put in the time. By that I mean if you do a Rush combo, simply by pressing punch rapidly, your character will do something that looks badass, but, it does a whole lot less damage than the next guy that is doing the combo properly. I think that’s a fair trade-off for those players that just do not have or want to put the time in to get the skill, but do still want to see the flashy and cool combos. Anyway, just know that the depth and breadth of content for KoF XIV is here, and that there is some in-game framework to train and get better, but it’s going to require a commitment from you to really progress. That’s not too hard to believe really, but I figure it was worth mentioning.
On the other hand, if you’re like me and you simply are not interested or just can’t budget the time to become so deeply involved in the KoF lore and gameplay, KoF XIV still offers a good-to-great time. As I’m not really a multiplayer gamer, I started up the Story expecting, well, more than I got. The Story is barebones and super generic. Basically you have a very large man with the KoF championship belt (think WWE) and a huge sports arena with a TV crew filming the tournament. You choose your team and go to various stages and do your battles, sometimes before battle a very brief cutscene will play that, in my experience, has nothing to do with any coherent over-arching story at all, it’s just chatter between the two characters about to fight. Get yourself through ten of these battles including the boss fight, and then a secret, true boss fight afterwards, and you’ve saved the world and won the championship, case closed. For traditionalists like me who grew up with some of these games and others like Street Fighter and Mortal Kombat, some kind of two to three image ‘victory screen’ with a blurb about one or all three characters would have been great, but that’s just not offered here in KoF XIV.
Before getting back to some pros about the game, a bit more not so positive views. Graphics. KoF XIV has this kind of high res, yet not super detailed and ‘shiny’ look to it that is not bad per se, but it definitely just has a ‘forced’ look to it. By forced, I mean that the artwork and animations look nice, but the 1080p resolution doesn’t seem to fit the graphics quite right. If you’ve ever taken an older game, kept all of the graphical assets the same, and just upped the resolution, it’s that unnatural sort of look that you get that I see with KoF XIV. Again the framerate and animations are great, but the overall appearance has a disagreeable shininess and artificial look that is hard to shake. I must admit I also find most of the backgrounds to be pretty bland and uninteresting, and the music itself follows a similar more or less forgettable path.
With that said, the core of the experience feels and plays great. Controls are familiar to anyone who has played the series before but you can of course tweak them. Responsiveness on the DualShock4 is nigh perfect, even if I can’t get my double half circles and diagonals very reliably, I think the fault lies with me as opposed to the game or controller. Load times are brief, fight pacing is snappy and never lags, and the AI by default at least is kind of easy and tends to be much more reactive than proactive in their aggression. So, while the game may have more of a learning curve than you may be used to, the Story mode is kind of forgettable, and while the graphics are kind of perplexing, the overall feel combined with the amount of content here is really substantial.
With that, let’s get to the summary…
