What just went wrong? SNK Playmore was doing a good job until this. Did they just got lazy or something?
But King Of Fighters XII however is a huge letdown. It such a huge letdown because it has way too many problems. I mean the gameplay was good, but like I said, it has way too many problems. First off, there's no final boss, not enough game modes, and the lack of online play. And the computer a.i is soooooo bad. The computer a.i. in this game just randomly punch, kick, and jumping. And most of the characters in this game doesn't even perform a super move.
It also hads some glitches like the difficulties. As some of you probably notice, they were mixed up because Easy is Hard and Hard is Easy. On top of that, there's no option you could turn the infinity timer. There's a glitch when Raiden perform a super move on Elizabeth as handcuffs, but if you do it on the corner, nothing happened. Half of the english voices are would've been better. And yeah, this game is way too easy since the computer a.i. is horrible. I'm sorry to say this, but I wouldn't play a game like that with such a crappy ai.
And some of the characters are very unbalanced to play with like Ralf and Clark for an example. The character sprites also still pixels rather than so-called hand-drawn as you definitely can tell if you have a HDTV. For the most part, I also think the critical counter is kinda cheap in the way. Then you had Arcade Mode, which is basically a Time Attack to see how much fast you beat all 5 stages. That's is the worst game mode of all time. I know its a dream match and all.
The character roster is so small because its only 22 playable characters. And speaking of playable characters, how come SNK Playmore haven't confirm four more exclusive characters though? That's what I don't get. Or maybe they will probably have them in the DLC, but I don't know. In fact, all the characters' movesets felt undone because like Mature only have two special moves.
Overall, this game is the biggest disappointment I've ever played. It just basically felt unfinished. I only played it to see it for myself when my older brother rent it from Hollywood Video. I'm just really disappointing at this game. SNK Playmore had opportunity to port this on PS3 and Xbox 360 consoles. They should've put more effort to the game and confirm more than two exclusive characters, but they screwed it up and rushed it. Its gonna be very sad that this game will not sell well due to the biggest flaws. Seriously, it will not. And it doesn't feel like no rebirth at all. I think that's the reason why don't nobody care about this game because some of them knew it was gonna suck. This game is not gonna hold very long because like 4 or 5 days, you'll probably gonna get sick of it after a while. Besides, this game barely hads modes like Arcade, Versus, Training, and the Online Play. Basically, there's not that much you could do in the game. Seriously, I mind as well stick with Street Fighter IV and Blazblue since they were the only two are successful fighting games. Or play other King Of Fighters games instead. Do yourself a favorite, do not waste your money on this game until the price drop. Otherwise one of you are gonna get bamboozle for 60 bucks. In fact, this game shouldn't even worth 60 bucks since it felt unfinished. It would've be like 20 bucks instead. Here's the sad part, there are gonna be a lot of people returning this game back in store. SNK Playmore better do something about this because right now, they slipping again. They kinda ruined me after I'd play this game. They was doing decent with some of their fighting games that they release before like Samurai Shodown and Fatal Fury, but I don't know how could these game designers messed up on a new King Of Fighters game so bad because I kinda liked SNK Playmore? How could they do such a thing? Well I just hope they'll gonna fix their mistakes if they ever make the next one. I also will looked forward to Tekken 6.
PROS
+ Nice new hand drawn
+ Cool backgrounds
CONS
- Small character roster
- Characters feel unbalanced
- Laggy online play
- Bad glitches
- Bad AI
- Not that much game modes
- No final boss
- Doesn't worth a full price