Fatal Fury 2

"Better than the first but not by much"

Fatal Fury has always struggled against the mighty Street Fighter 2 and this game is no different. The first one was quite poor and whilst this sequel improves hugely on the original it still needs a lot of work.

There are more characters in this game with all the playable characters from the first game returning, joined with 5 new characters. All these new designs are not that good, especially characters like Cheng and Jubei. Like other fighters every character has some special moves as well as punches and kicks.

The controls are very different from before in a good way. There is no longer a throw button and now there are 2 punch buttons and 2 kick buttons which do different damage to the opponent. There are also buttons to do a power attack to knock the opponent around the stage and a button to leap into a different part of the stage.

The way you could change where you go in a stage has also been kept in this sequel, so when the other fighter is throwing fireballs at you you can leap into another part of the stage to avoid them. This is the game's original feature but the CPU over uses it making matches quite boring at times.

The cpu in this game is annoying. It is too difficult. Even on easy you will be finding yourself struggling to win. This makes the one player game not much fun, and even when you play against a friend you won't play for long since hte game itself is not much fun.

One reason for this is because of the d-pad. It is not very responsive to your commands making special moves very hard to do, but the CPU can do any special move perfectly whenever it wants too. Lame.

This game also rips of Street Fighter 2 in the way of the boss characters you fight in the last third of the game. There are 4 boss characters just like in Street Fighter 2, and one is a bull fighting Matador, just like Vega, and another is a boxer like Balrog. The last boss, Krauser, is probably the best character in the game but you can't even play as the bosses.

This plays like any other fighting game with you fighting opponents and knocking them out. Each character has a life bar and by attacking the opponent the bar goes down, when it's gone completely the opponent is knocked out and you win the fight.

Fatal Fury 2 is better than Fatal Fury 1 but not by much, and it still is terrible when compared to any Street Fighter game on the SNES so get one of those instead.

Reviewer's Score: 2/10, Originally Posted: 11/28/05