Stylish 2D fighting game series King of Fighters has hopefully reached its nadir with King of Fighters XII, with the game being slated by reviewers and apparently having a variety of embarrassing bugs even after having been delayed for reasons which are now painfully obvious.
Playtesting appears not to be the order of the day at SNK Playmore; behold the “handcuff glitch”:
Famitsu appears not to have been paid off, giving it a meagre 22 out of 40, and has given the game a rating even lower than the abysmal Arcana Heart II port, and significantly lower than BlazBlue.
PS3 and Xbox 360 versions are said to be equally poor, though much of the criticism should presumably be levelled at the arcade version too.
Another reviewer lashes out at the state of the game’s multiplayer, awarding it 1.5 of 5:
But here’s the kicker: KoF12’s online play is (to put it mildly) atrocious.
Spectator mode suckage aside, you can’t filter prospective opponents by connection quality, you can’t kick unwanted players from your lobbies, you can’t view a friends-only leaderboard, and you can’t filter saved match replays by user-defined criteria (but that’s okay, since they’re worthless anyway — no player names are attached to saved match videos!).
All of these very egregious flaws are moot, though, because KoF12 features the absolute worst netcode of any fighting game that exists on a current platform, to such an extreme degree that you may as well not bother with it at all.
Matches range from “horribly laggy” to “near-literal slideshow,” and given how far online fighters have come, it’s frankly embarrassing to witness such terrible netcode making it into a retail product in 2009.
A variety of gameplay videos do display lag to varying degrees…
Fans are presumably taking solace in BlazBlue (which comes with panchira), though King of Fighters XII does at least have very nice character animation…
You can of course try for yourself.
Blame the fat guy!
You like KOF play M.U.G.E.N
I’ll stick with my Scarlet Weather Rhapsody, thanks,,
Also, if you still like SNK, and don’t mind not having online play, you should probably try importing KOF 2002 Unlimited Match, because I hear it’s excellent.
Well, that’s disappointing. It pisses me off since being a huge KOF fan, I was looking forward to getting this. SFIV is fun but its appeal has waned for me, and although Blazblue is wonderful, I wanted to try another PS3 fighting game. I enjoyed KOF XII in the arcades quite a bit as well. KOF is the series that made me interested in fighting games as more than a passing fascination. Ive always liked KOF better than Street Fighter, but it never caught on in the US. If KOF XII fails, that might never change.
I would have been willing to put up with relatively small changes from the arcade, even a dearth of extra content. But poor online play? Glitches? I won’t accept this, SNK Playmore!
It’s probably their unfamiliarity with the console and online play in general. But I still won’t buy it.
Also, Mai is pig disgusting, good riddance. I’m so tired of her and Andy’s marriage s♥♥t.