#King the king of fighters xv series#

An ageing fighting game fan like myself finds it almost impossible outside of training mode, and while I recognise a lot of that is down to my old joints, it is tricky to use a controller for this game. Honestly, an octopus would struggle with some of the inputs.

#King the king of fighters xv series#

Most of the super duper special moves are a series of sweeping D-Pad/left stick motions, with the worst being “quarter circle back-half circle forward” motions, and then the pressing of two buttons at the same time. However, even on the so called “Easy” mode, it is anything but.Ī large part of the difficulty, if I’m honest, is down to trying to play The King of Fighters XV with a traditional controller, instead of using a fight stick or an arcade cabinet. What plays out though is pretty much as you would be expecting a series of beatles, and with each character having one health bar, each bout could be over in three rounds, if you take out the whole opposing team with one character, or it could be as many as five, if the teams are more equally matched.

The standard well endowed and skimpily clad ladies round out the roster, and all in all, with forty-two fighters to pick from, creating a team you like should be fairly straightforward. There are the standard Ken/Ryu type characters, with the basic fireball/ dragon punch control inputs, and large yet slow wrestler types with a neat line in spinning piledrivers (they seem to remind me of someone…). The characters on display are a varied bunch, but fall largely into the standard kind of fighting game tropes. The personality of the characters is portrayed very well, and they interact with each other nicely, adding another layer of story to the way the game is played out. Audio-wise The King of Fighters XV is also bang on, with good voice acting and suitably crunching impacts. The attacks are bone crunching with just a regular punch, and when the super moves and super duper moves begin to flow, the pyrotechnics on screen are almost breathtaking some of them are wince inducing as well. The character sprites are big, bold and well designed, and the way they move is absolutely bang on as well. Here the story is very good, as the graphics are bright, shiny and look very superb on the Xbox Series X|S. The story is suitably bonkers, I mean, the trouble at the end of the last tournament would put me off entering the next one, I don’t know about you? But now we must address the way the game is presented.

I mean, if you need an excuse to bring back fighters from previous games, then this is a pretty good one, right? Anyway, what this leads to is the start of a new tournament, and hopefully this time there won’t be any nasty creatures appearing to wreak havoc. Apparently though, in the last game, a creature known as Verse appeared and not only got a good kicking, but it also managed to revive a few fighters from past tournaments. Now, I have to hold my hands up and say that I am in no way invested in the KOF franchise, as I haven’t played any of the franchise since its glory days in the arcade. As everyone knows, the most important thing with a fighting game like The King of Fighters XV is the overarching narrative.