The King of Fighters 2001

"The King enters the building again"

Yahoo finally a new DC game and not an unknown crap outing. Saturday morning I decided to buy KoF2k1 as the store in my city still had one, luckily I still had the rights on a 25% discount so I could get it for a nice price (60 euro is nice here). Lets see if this game is worth the price and worth playing at all? If you are known with arcades you probably know of KoF and NeoGeo, almost every arcade somehow has an old SNK cabinet and if you are lucky they even have a good fighter like KoF or Last blade. SNK is known as a hardcore gameproducer and so is Sega, so releasing these games on the DC is only natural IMHO as they will sink in oblivion on commercial systems like the X-Box and Ps2. Well we where already surprised with kof2000 last summer and now we got a winter with Kof2001. On to the review:

Graphics: Ofcourse graphics play a part in the high tech era we live in but to be short if you are a graphics freak you wouldn't like this game. Its not 3D and its also not 2D like GGX and its not fluid as SF3.. Yet i like the graphics as this game looks just ok for a 2D game! Its less fluid than Garou but its because this features 4 times as more characters. So playability over graphics here. Still its not ugly at all and typical recognizable SNK trademark. 7/10

Sound the sound of this game is clear and pretty good.. the voices are cool and its always fun hearing shingo being KO'd. However the music score is not even near the level of kof2000... but to be honest kof2000 has (wich KoF98) the best KoF music of all imho, so comparing it to the immediate best is not fair. When compared to 97 and 99 i still think those are better. There is no arrange BGM but i never like arrange anyway so i won't make a point of it. All around not the best not the baddest. The announcer sounds better than in the prequels so it makes up a bit for the letdown. 6/10

Gameplay: Most important feature for an old school 2D game like KoF, if a game like this fails here it won't appeal to most people because an old school look combined with awful gameplay is not tolerated. Well fear not, this gameplay is good In fact its controls are the best of any KoF on the Dreamcast. The reason why is because i can pull of the fwd, back, fwd + P moves in this game 3 out of 5 times with the joypad! In all the others on DC i only could do it 3 out of 10 tries. The same goes for some other moves like Kyo's link punches etc which are slightly more forgiving either. Very neat controls even with joypad thanks to 4 button play. 10/10

Lastability: Is this game boring after 2 hours or does it stay fun for weeks? Well with 40 characters to master and a bucketload of backgrounds go figure. Did i mention the puzzle game already? This puzzle game is cooler than 2000's minigame imho and is actually cool against eachother. After making some block destroy combo's the characters will actually do a super move on eachother in the same fashion as puzzlefighter... quite fun for a minigame. As i said it has an enourmous line up of characters maybe not as big as MvC2 but not 1 palette swap unlike MvC2 which featured Ryu ken akuma dan which where basically all swaps. All in all quite a complete game but no mission - and world tour mode's, vs shops etc ofcoure. Still 8/10

Get the game? Tough one, you see since its an import it won't be at the same price as your average game plus the fact the DC is in theory dead and buried can make some of you think that its not really worth it to pay a high price for it... However if you are an hardcore import, DC, arcadegames, KoF or 2D fighter freak I'd recommend it even if you own 2000 already. I bought it myself too and didn't regret it!

All in all I have to say 2000 is the better game but 2001 is the better conversion compared to the MVS. The difference is minor but the aquarium stage in 2000 had some (/me goes nitpick mode) slowdown and as I said before 2001's controls are more forgiving which is only for the good. Well done playmore for still supporting the Dreamcast, Roll on KoF2002!

TOTAL SCORE: 8/10.

Finally to all visitors: Don't mess with fireworks and i want to wish everyone very happy 2003! Cheers!

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 12/29/02, Updated 12/29/02