20.0 hours played
Written 17 days ago
I am not familiar with the series, thus I can not compare this game to its predecessors.
This is a typical fighting game with attacks, blocks, jumps, special moves and so on.
The main notable difference from other titles like “Street Fighter” is a combo system, which allows landing of super moves at its finish with ease.
While the game allows classic one-on-one battles, its main setup uses teams of 3 characters each facing each other. Battle is still performed in one-on-one mode, but once the opponent is down, his teammate takes his place in the next round. Then the cycle repeats until all team members are defeated.
The game claims this is a “unique” system, but I am pretty sure I have seen this before at least at “Mortal Kombat 3” and probably in other titles too.
While it is indeed an uncommon practice and makes the game focused on the “team” instead of the individual fighters, its implementation is quite dull. In the battle the team members can not assist each other, there are no passive abilities granted by the team or anything else. The team battles from recent “Mortal Kombat” games or “Injustice 2” provide much more sense of teamwork than KOF.
The list of playable characters is quite long: each one is unique with his/her set of special moves. However only a few characters provide really unique tactics in battle, like relying on throws or using teleports. Mostly each one follows a pattern: projectile, charge, anti-air plus something else.
The game provides quite a limited selection of gameplay modes: “versus”, “arcade”, “boss challenge” - that is all. There is no “survival”, “tournament”, “battle with special conditions” or anything else. Considering that “arcade” always ends up in a fight with the 2 exactly same super bosses, the game becomes dull very quickly as it exhausts new fighting possibilities.
There is a main story attached to the “arcade” and presented via a series of short cinematics. But it is very poor. It is hard to tell what is exactly going on, why these particular characters stick together and so on.
If you pick the team right, the “arcade” ends up with a short epilogue for it. But there is no prologue or explanation why these characters have formed a team in the first place, or why they have come to the tournament.
There are some cinematic dialogues between different particular characters, if they face each other in the story mode, but these are quite rare.
Overall, the game does not provide enough means to dive into its lore, to get familiar with the characters or world around them. During the play the content becomes exhausted quite quickly.
The game has a special graphics, which provides Anime style appearance while using 3D character models. Of course it can not be called realistic as it obviously appears like a cartoon. But it is enjoyable and provides enough details in rendering.
Music is unremarkable but suits the gameplay well enough.
Localization puzzles me. Some characters speak English, while most - Japanese/Chinese (I am unsure which one exactly). It seems like it was intended this way, but overall it appears quite poorly, especially considering that the main story has no English voicing at all.
Total rating 5/10.
The game is not exactly bad, but it's lacking content and gameplay diversity.
If you are a fan of the franchise you’ll probably like it. Otherwise - pick something else.