The King of Fighters EX: Neo Blood

"Is it really good to be the king?"

I've been waiting this game to be released Stateside before I submitted my review. Playing the ROM on my computer was one thing but nothing compared to playing it on the platform intended. With that said, I'll begin my review.

SNK has always been known for their more artistic style of game play and more depth due to the difficulty of combo inputs. This game, however, seems as if they strayed from the classic pattern. The sprites look decent but are by no means up to par with the sprites in SFA3. There are many, many frames of animation left out of the various characters. Likewise, the backgrounds look very bad and there is absolutely no animation in the backgrounds. What puts the nail in this game's proverbial coffin is the fact that even the artwork displayed in the non-game play parts is only sub-par and very low-res looking.

Even worse than the graphics is the sound. Half of the time, the voices seem to fade out or just can't be heard at all. The other half of the time, you wonder why they even bothered throwing the ''voices'' in at all. I put voices in quotes like that because they're so blurred and fuzzy that it doesn't sound like someone is actually talking when you do hear them. The music is simply atrocious. Gameboy Color can do better than this. In fact, I think the old Gameboy did better than this with Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan. Imagine that.

So what exactly did they do right with this game? Not a whole lot, I assure you. The game play is somewhat unresponsive in that when you input commands, it sometimes takes a half a second for the character to react. It's good enough that it's still playable as the moves are easily done most of the time but the tiny d-pad makes the more exact motions a bit harder to do.

Overall, the game is a good iteration of a classic game. It's only $14.99 at Babbages/Gamestop stores and for that price, it's well worth the money. I'm somewhat glad Sammy took so long releasing it here. Otherwise, I would have paid $30 for this and it's not worth that kind of money by any means. If you can wait another year for Sammy to release the much better sequel, go for it but at the current price, any diehard fight fan will get their money worth out of this purchase.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 02/13/03, Updated 02/13/03