We play King of Fighters 15 on PS5 and tell you what’s new, what’s old, what’s blue, and why it’s worth getting married, in this note!
If you look at a typical fighting game, you see people with martial proficiency and years of physical training who once even wielded supernatural power to become an ultimate fighter. But those who played in the golden age of arcades were people from the 90s who wanted to pretend to be extreme and cool. Then came King of Fighters that mixed the best of both worlds because it was extreme, nineties and had a bad boy attitude, but it was also a hyper-technical fighting game with a very high skill ceiling where if you learned to play well you could become a monster. The saga became legendary with its own public that followed it passionately everywhere, and now it returns with King of Fighters 15 (or XV…).
King of Fighters 15 for PlayStation, PC and Xbox is a fighting game (obviously) that comes to modernize the experience of its previous installment with a highly refined roster, aware of its legacy and its most popular characters, and with incredibly polished mechanics. If you come from playing previous games, you will be surprised how, despite the 3D models, the weight, rhythm, combos and style of the saga are intact. Correspondingly, you have your two strong attacks, your two weak attacks, your evasive roll, your counter, your dash, and all the moves so you can make your combos while charging up the meter to unleash your most powerful attacks. thick to enemies. You know exactly what it is from minute one, as if you were listening to a Ramones album, and you come here precisely because no one else gives you that.
However, this is more than a repeat and there are several new and quite interesting concepts. For example, you can now use a shatter-strike to consume a super bar and leave the opponent wide open and gifted to receive your combo. You can also activate blow back, the counterattack from a defensive position to start again. Afterwards, each character has their EX, Supers, MAX Supers, and the climax Supers, the most cinematic versions of each attack that are incredibly “cool and cheeky”. You’ll recognize many of these moves because the animations are the same as KOF14, but modernized.
This is a game built for fans, super technical and full of cancel, movements, and to know the position of your fighter’s body with each attack you launch to predict the enemy’s but on the other hand, if you are new to this, you have an uphill road. What needs to be balanced a bit is the system of rush, a kind of automatic combo that helps players understand the flow of combat, the weight, and the type of things you can do. If you tap, for example, four times the fast fist, you will make a combo that leads to the special that your super bar allows – but it is extremely predictable and any expert will always see it coming -.
As if to remark that King of Fighters 15 is for the usual, the game does not really include a story mode. The singleplayer is summed up to play in arcade and see a cinematic at the end that is not even acted by the actors, they just throw a couple of lines of text. If you are interested in lore, or something, it’s not here. Of course, you will find super cute, hegemonic people, dressed in bright colors and with punk and urban aesthetics that range from the New York of the 80s to what you would see in Shibuya any day. Yes, you have 38 characters who are hegemonic and a dinosaur, to add some inclusion.
The graphics and visuals are spectacular, and it’s crazy how much better the lightning bolts and flames and stuff look compared to previous games. Purists may miss the full pixel look of the game, but what I know graphically exudes style everywhere.
The fighting in King of Fighters 15 it’s three vs. three, and part of the strategic element is in the order of the characters you use – some are better at charging up the super bar, and others are good at sweeping and making long combos with the bar already loaded. The idea is to manage your resources, and eat the life of the rival before he kills you. Experience will allow you to recognize the roles and realize what works best with your style, but we also recommend looking at the experts to see what they do and how they handle it.
Speaking of which, the best thing about KOF 15 is its online modes. To begin with, the game is perfect, not a single complaint. You will be able to set up custom games, pre-configure up to 15 teams, compose different types of tournaments, register player names to make continuous events, and more. You have the classic ranked, casual and lobby, and there are even quick fight modes to have a few pineapples with another player while you wait for your game, or spectator mode to analyze the combat.
In conclusion
If you got here, it’s probably because you already know King of Fighters, and in that sense we have good news: King of Fighters 15 is the most King of Fighters of all SNK’s King of Fighters, and on top of that it’s a 10 on a technical level. If you are new to the saga, yes, prepare yourself because the tutorials are a bit deficient and you will have to experiment and receive a lot of pineapples until you understand how the attacks are countered, how the combos are made and how the flow of the game is planned. combat. We would be very surprised if it attracts new players, but if you are one of the old ones, you will be happy.
King of Fighters doesn’t have royalty in its name for nothing – what it does is unique and that makes it king. Of course, it will be a Monaco-style middle kingdom that sometimes people forget exists and cannot locate it on the map, but everyone who visits it tells you that it is one of the most beautiful places in the world.
RELEASE DATE | February 14, 2022 |
DEVELOPER | SNK |
DISTRIBUTOR | SNK |
PLATAFORMS | PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Windows PC |