The King of Fighters 2006

"A Huge Roster, Loads Of Missions, Tons Of Unlockable Outfits Makes Maximum Impact 2"

Having played the original Maximum Impact, this is what spurred me on to want to play the sequel. MI2 provides a very similar experience to the original, but with a hugely expanded roster to play with. With a release price tag of only £25, I have to say it feels like publishers are finally learning what a decent price tag is, however, unfortunately it's probably only due to the fact the next generation of consoles are here. Might as well get used to it, MI3 has been announced for the PS3 and will probably end up costing £50-60.

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Storyline (5/10)
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The game has a huge cast, and thus different reasons for why they're participating in the tournament. However, most of the reasons you're provided with are terrible excuses. Some of the inter character rivalries are interesting, but you're not really provided with any information about them. Once you've finished the story mode with certain characters you'll more often than not be left with unanswered questions since they always seem to end abruptly. I can forgive the fact that fighting games never have the best storylines, but it's annoying to have the game so often just end cut scenes in what feels to be the middle of them.

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Gameplay (6/10)
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I would have rated this higher, but there's one major flaw that ruins the entire game; it's incredibly unbalanced. There are a set group of characters who move faster, hit harder and have a better moveset than the rest of the cast, and while I can appreciate that this is done to set them apart and give them the spotlight as the main characters, it means you're punished for not wanting to play as them. They have also ruined a lot of characters, by this I mean added stupid gimmicks like having them stop to speak after hitting a little combo. This leaves them entirely open to attack and ruins the experience of playing as them as it quickly leads to frustration. While it may have been done to make the characters ‘quirky', like I said, it ruins them as characters and for some makes them pretty unusable.

There are other problems with the game, the most prominent being the story mode. While again, the set few characters get an explanation and some interesting cut scenes, there are many who don't even get a tailored cut scene at the end of the game, and instead you hear the same little speech by Jivatma, the final boss, again and again. While storyline is never particularly good for a lot of fighting games, it feels incredibly annoying that after fighting through the story mode of the game, you're not really treated with one. The other thing with this mode, is their way of telling a story and setting up the reason for your chosen character to be in King Of Fighters, is to have an extremely long set of text float up from the bottom of the screen, in unreadable font. For the characters who get a decent ending, it's a nice reward for having done the game, but for those who don't it feels like a wasted experience.

In order to give you something else to do aside from the story mode and fighting friends, there are a series of missions to accomplish. These range from fighting with mines on the floor, to having to defeat the enemy with a specific move to having to collect medals that drop when you hit the enemy. While some of these are fun and provide a necessary distraction, most of them are grossly unfair, for example, only you can set of the mines, while the enemy can walk over them with no problem. In other missions where you have to defeat the enemy in a certain way in a tight time limit, you can guarantee the enemy will spend most of their time blocking, conversely when you need to break their defence, they will rarely block. The explanations of the missions are also very bad, and in most case provide a misleading idea of what you're supposed to be doing. For example, you are told that medals will drop onto the stage and you have to collect ‘X' of them, what this means is that there are medals already on the stage that are stationary. Another wants you to build up three power gauges and win, however, I've done this and gone above three and always failed. There are other examples of what seems to be a very poor translation job that has gone by unnoticed. It really ruins what fun there is to be had here, which is a shame, because there's a whole lot of these missions.

However, aside from these issues, there is fun to be had with this game, and there is such a diverse amount of fighting types on offer that it allows you to start up using a different character when you tire of one. The two player mode is entertaining, and provides a decent level of distraction. While the problems with the game are pretty bad, it doesn't take away the fact that the actual fighting portion of the game is pretty fun providing you play against human opponents.

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Graphics (7/10)
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Most of the characters look good, and the ones that don't are mainly because they look bland in comparison. They all have a large amount of alternate outfits, which while a lot range from odd to just bad, many are at least interesting. What lets the game down is the environments, which just don't seem to have had nearly the same level of detail put into them. However, most the time, you're probably not going to be staring at the backgrounds, especially considering how well endowed the female cast seem to be in this game. The opening and ending scenes are really well done, and it's a shame there aren't more rendered cut scenes in the game, since it's something they do really well.

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Sounds (4/10)
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This game has some pretty awful audio. The voice acting ranges from acceptable to just plain horrid, with voices that don't match the characters, screech and slurred sentences that you can't even hear. This is just the cut scenes, the in game sounds can be worse, to the extent that some characters can be absolute hell to fight against due to the noises they make while fighting, such as Yuri. The background music is also pretty dire and none of them are anything really memorable and again, a few of them are nasty to listen to. The announcer is extremely irritating, and what I hated most was the ‘success' noise that happened every time you unlocked something, since you could hear up to three times in succession, something that isn't very pleasant to the ears.

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Lifespan (5/10)
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Quite frankly, it depends how highly you rate the prospect of unlocking numerous alternate outfits for all the characters. Personally, I don't mind it for some characters, since collecting their outfits can be rather rewarding, or at least interesting to see what the developers decided to give them as attire, such as Mignon. There are also a number of characters to unlock, but while this does give the game a large cast to play with, most the unlockable characters aren't great, and don't even get a personalised story mode. As mentioned, there are a lot of missions available which do give the game a pretty long lifespan, but as mentioned, a lot of them are infuriating beyond belief. For fighting games, there's a lot on offer, but all to soon it just feels like you're doing more of the same, and unfortunately, this means that you can only play so long before you have to take a break from the game since the characters play pretty similar.

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Summary (7/10)
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One of the better fighting games available for the PS2, and something that was actually released with a decent price tag over here. Even better I managed to obtain it for £6, so to be honest, by opinion of the game is slightly skewed since I can't really be too upset with it after getting it for such a low price. It does have it's problems that can ruin the fun of playing the game, but there are so many characters on offer, with so many alternate outfits it does have a decent lifespan. Along with having a solid game underneath to play with, this not only succeeds at being a decent game, but also at providing a good multiplayer experience. I did originally give this a six, since it averages out the gameplay, graphics and lifespan, since quite frankly, audio and story don't matter too much for a game like this, but in my opinion, the game deserves to be rated higher than other games I have given a six. I believe this fair, since I have marked games down as I didn't really feel they were equal to games I had given a similar mark. Thus this game gets a seven, and despite it's flaws is one of the better beat em up games available on the PS2 and has a lot to offer and unlock.

Reviewer's Score: 7/10, Originally Posted: 07/30/07