KoF XII retains the esence but the small roster and the missing fan favorites might upset some of the hardcore players.
What has changed from previous games, mostly some of the moves. Athena's special isn't as overpowered as it was and her "teleporting" skill is gone too. My guess is some of the changes were made to balance the roster better. If we can look at other games and compare we can find that a smaller roster sometimes increases balance over all the available characters lowering the chance of having one single character being picked by everyone. Such is the case of games like Blazblue, that although 11 characters seems like too few, it actually is pretty well balanced and offers variety for all tastes. The other change is the addition of a simple mode of control which offers players who can't for the life of them fight by doing the combos, KoF 12 adds this mechanic in which you only need to hold a direction on the left stick and a button to activate the special move.
You will not find a story mode here. You have your basic Arcade mode comprising of 5 stages. Your standard versus mode. Practice and the gallery for all your unlockable art work and stuff.
Now, where you will be spending the most of your time is the online multiplayer. SNK has done a pretty good job with the online, although it's nothing out of this world.
There are two kinds of matches in the Online, the Arcade Match which is your basic Ranked match in which you gain battle points to increase your rank in the leaderboards, and then you got your Player match where the rank means nothing.
You have the option of fighting on 1 on 1 battles or the standard 3 on 3.
The Online component also offers Clans. You can create a clan, gather your friends in it and have clan battles. Only clans that have more than 3 members can participate in clan wars. How this works is that 3 members of each clan are selected as representatives and they fight the other representatives for victory. There can be only up to 6 people per lobby, while in normal non clan battles, up to 8 people may be in a lobby waiting for their turns to fight.
It is however a shame that most of the female characters are gone. While the sexy Athena, the strong Leona, and the exclusive aditions of Elizabeth and Mature are pretty cool, the absence of Mai, Blue Mary, Yuri Sakazaki and Cula are really felt.
I have spent only a little time on the game and there may be hidden characters in there but I do hope that SNK adds a few more to the roster. Also Geese Howard is nowhere to be seen? Come on SNK what happened? You leave Ash Crimson but you take Geese out and Takuma? What's the deal?
Overall, the graphics are great, the characters move gracefully and fluidly and they feel nice and smooth. The gameplay is fast and the counters are hard to get used to but once in the fray you'll find yourself doing it on reflex.
Sorry if this review seems rushed but my internet is dying so I had to rewrite this like 3 times already and I didn't save the good draft so, hope this is useful.
EDIT.- Having spent more time in the game now I can talk a bit more indepth of what the actual gameplay is like.
So, the arcade comprises 5 stages, no boss whatsoever, there's a few cutscenes between the 3rd match and the final match and that's it for story. So far I have yet to figure out what in christ's name I'm supposed to do to unluck the artwork.
Now, the online... I still have trouble having an opinion about this because 1 most battles are laggy as hell and when it's not most people disconnect when you're handing their butts to them. Most battles I've gone through are 1 on 1, which totally defeats the purpose of the 3 on 3 that KoF is famous for. So I hope SNK does something to make the synchronization better because the lag kills multiplayer games.
About the gameplay... What in god's name made SNK think that optimizing the Stick on the ps3 over the d-pad was actually a good idea? Yeah, you heard me, they optimized the use of the stick and playing with the darn d-pad is almost impossible. I feel like I'm playing with the X360 d-pad when playing this game. When the heck did it become best to use the stick on the Playstation instead of the d-pad in a fighting game? Well SNK said it was time. I could activate Ryo's Haoshoukoken without even doing the move properly, and when I tried to do the special Ryuuko Ranbu I kept getting the Zanretsu Ken. It's really a shame that this had to go this way, because it feels sloppy, I get they'd want to optimize the stick on the 360 but on the PS3 it's just a waste of time, the d-pad is really accurate and sacrifice that with the stick just doesn't make sense.
As I said some of the special moves that some of the characters had are gone as well as Iori's fire whenever he attacked, it is replaced by some purple glowing things that flash whenever he attacks which makes it look weird.
The teams are gone, you will see trios of characters that have nothing to do with the previous team organizations in previous titles. You will see Leona with Clark and you may say that's not wrong but then the third member is Benimaru... yeah you go WTF what's going on?
Most of the things that seemed organized in KoF are unorganized here. Characters like Geese Howard, Rugal, MAI SHIRANUI, YURI SAKAZAKI, BLUE MARY and the like are gone and in their place are Ash Crimson, Raiden, and some others who all us fans could perfectly live without.
This KoF entry rather seems like SNK simply threw the towel near the end and just put it out incomplete, because this definitely doesn't feel finished at all. And by the way, did I mention there's a 775 Mb download right off the bat? And that when you go into options, after the update, you try to select install, well the game doesn't let you. It tells you that was what the update was for... once again WTF if it's already on the disc, why download all that?! Can't you just put it in install it, and then download the update? That's just plain idiocy.
Overall, don't buy it, the 60 dollar price tag is way off on this one, it should be 40 dollars and that's already saying a lot. It's a game that doesn't have enough content, feels rushed and unfinished, a total let down because if something SNK had for this title was TIME and they wasted it. What's the point in making such beautiful drawings on the characters if the final product was something anyone could easily make on Mugen. Oh and countering the specials and interupting the Galactica Phantom mid punch... that's just wrong.