Considering its been a decade since I played this Franchise, I am pretty impressed with how far its come.
If you are a die hard KOF fan, chances are you are going to hate this game for all the reason that every other review above and below mine will state, but I am a bit of an oddity in the sense that aside from a few that I played back on AES or SNES I have generally paid no mine to this series for a while.
As a general rule, I love the fighting game genre and I especially enjoy some of the franchises that are not quite as known or played as Street Fighter so that anyone can sit down and enjoy the game without being Dragon Punched to death in 15 seconds by a veteran of the series.
I don't seek out a fighting game for the depth of the single player mode, and if you do this is not the game for you. I was able to clear it first time through in the Arcade mode in about ten minutes, and was able to improve that to about eight the second time through.
The aspect of this game that I consider to be the hook was the multiplayer, both offline and online.
The game allows you to pick teams of three characters (out of the 22 that are available) and go head to head with another team of three that your opponent has selected.
That is where this game shines for me, because its different and it requires me to adjust on the fly when character X is KOed and I need to deal with character Y right away.
The multiplayer aspect, coupled with the teams of three gives me something that I have lacked in a fighting games since the old Marvel Vs. Capcom series in the sense that it adds another dimension of strategy to the game.
Picking your team, and other order of the team can make a world of difference depending on who your opponent opts for and that aspect on its own has led to some epic battles among real friends and online friends alike.
Let me make this as simple as possible,
The game looks amazing, better then Tekken 6 and certainly on par with Street Fighter 4.
The game plays very well, in that the controls are responsive and that many of the different characters have a wealth of their own moves in which you can master and offers you a reason to work your way through the Arcade mode a few times.
Apparently the online LAG issue has been resolved via a patch, because my experience was excellent as crisp and quick as if my opponent was sitting beside me.
Aside from a classic like Street Fighter 4, this may be the fighter from 2009 that ends up getting the most play and because of the very cool three on three format it may end up surpassing it.
While I can understand why KOF fans are unhappy with this version of the game, the fact that en mass it has scored lower then Tekken 6 is beyond me.