King of Fighters XII (Xbox 360)

Graphics

There are no 3D graphics here, just high resolution 2D hand-drawn characters and settings. The arenas are quite nice and the overall design, drawing, animation and feel of the graphics add a retro 80’s atmosphere to the game. This is by far the best animated and drawn iteration of the long running brawler and whilst the characters can become slightly pixilated when they get up close, it is still a nice looking and well drawn game. These new sprites have a great colour palette and they are gorgeous to look at, especially when in motion since the animation is fluid and much better than previous games of the series. All the stages are typical of this kind of game, whilst lacking in variety, fighting in front of a crowd and so on, they are well done and well drawn.

AI

It does what it has to in Arcade Mode, offers a reasonable challenge and has no badass boss characters to challenge you. All in all, that’s quite disappointing in a way.

Sound

Good quality audio in terms of battle sounds are combined with some typical spot effects, it works and there’s not much more we can say about that.

Music

The music to the game lacks the frenetic J-Pop feel of many other games but the score is decent and it sounds Ok. It’s certainly better than some of the other fighting games; Street Fighter IV’s menu music comes immediately to mind.

Voice/Dialogue

Bad, as typically bad voice acting as one can get. The dialogue is also poorly written, but we don’t often play brawlers for Oscar winning performances or scripts, so they can be forgiven.

Multiplayer

The online portion of the game is a bit of a mess with laggy matches and a few other issues; it’s annoying that you can’t search for a game based on the latency of the players. There’s an arcade lobby, custom matches and of course ranked matches. With the co-op Clan Battle you and two other friends can battle other Clans, a nice way to showcase the game’s 3 on 3 play style, or it would be if there was less lag in the game. There have been patches but even for us, there was a noticeable amount of lag on certain games. One in ten games in fact.

Ow...my nose!

If you’re a fan of the series or you want another fighter to add to your collection, you could do worse than this one. KoF XII feels decent but it also seems to be a bit of a throwback in a way, the lack of a story mode doesn’t really bother us but it could potentially put players off. The speed is decent but the butchered online play actually damages the game and since most of the value comes from this feature, it’s a pretty hefty blow in that respect. We can recommend the game, as long as you’re willing to work around the shortcomings and faults.