The King of Fighters Neowave

Dead or Alive? Bah. Keep your Virtua Fighter, too. For a lot of fans out there, 2D fighting games are alive and well, thanks in no small part to SNK Playmore. The company has delivered a seemingly endless stream of King of Fighters games over the last two years, and it's not done yet: here comes Neowave.

For the last decade or so, the KoF series has pioneered the idea of 3-on-3 team fighting; when one character gets taken out, another steps in to pick up where the fight left off. They were made to run on the now-retired NeoGeo hardware, which deserves medals for its long tour of duty in arcades. But Neowave was built on new hardware, the Atomiswave system, so its Xbox port makes it look ... well, like a mix of technology from yesterday and 10 years ago.

All 36 characters (plus a few unlockables, which shall remain secret) look very pixellated on high-res rendered backgrounds. So if you look behind the giant blocks that make up Mai's heaving bustline, you'll see battlegrounds that include ornate fountains, suspension bridges and the intricate inner workings of a clock tower. It's more than a little weird - it looks like someone grafted a Super NES game onto their Xbox.

But graphical presentationisn't why people still play The King of Fighters - it's all about the technical gameplay. If you're a button-masher, you won't last long; KoF games reward skill, timing, knowledge of combination attacks and a lot of other things you probably don't have.

CATEGORIES
Latest in Fighting
Minecraft characters Alex and Steve riding in mine carts in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate, being chased by Bowser Jr..
Super Smash Bros. Ultimate villain Minecraft Steve is the star of the "best Smash clip of all time," as genius player makes a literal Trojan Horse to destroy an unsuspecting opponent
Super Smash Bros. for Nintendo 3DS key art.
Masahiro Sakurai says Super Smash Bros "might have died out" if not for late Nintendo president Satoru Iwata: "There's no doubt that he influenced me in many ways"
Mortal Kombat 2 3DO
After 32 years, Mortal Kombat 2 has finally been ported to the one hyper-expensive '90s console that could actually do it justice
jinx in 2xko weilding a big hammer with a smirk on her face
The League of Legends fighting game spin-off won't be getting its big playtest, but that's so that more of you can play it later this year
Retro Gamer
Retro Gamer celebrates Capcom’s greatest fighting games
A screenshot shows Fatal Fury ninja Mai performing a combat move in Street Fighter 6.
Fatal Fury's top anime girlfriend Mai "bounces" into Street Fighter 6, and her bouncy arrival is driving Capcom to horny madness: "She's giving fierce. She's slaying"
Latest in Features
Marvel Rivals Spider-Man
Spider-Man has become every Marvel Rivals player's worst nightmare
The Punisher holding two machine guns in the rain
Daredevil: Born Again - Learn the bullet-riddled comic book history of the Punisher before he officially joins the MCU
A woman in a underwater machine waving during the cinematic teaser for Subnautica 2.
Subnautica 2: Everything we know about the new underwater survival game
The AMD Ryzen 7 8700G being held above a motherboard by a reviewer
AMD's pro-consumer 9070 strategies are exactly why it's primed to dominate the CPU market in 2025
Assassin's Creed Shadows cinematic screenshot
Assassin's Creed Shadows' transmog looks set to combine the best of Odyssey and Vahalla to make changing my drip easier than ever
Split Fiction screenshot of Zoe and Mio in a fantasy world
Split Fiction feels like a Mass Effect-meets-Fable platformer and I'm obsessed with it after just one hour