	The King of Fighters Neowave
	Developer: SNK Playmore Publisher: Ignition Entertainment Release Date: Out Now Players: 1-2	Words By:
Along with The King of Fighters: Maximum Impact 2, Ignition Entertainment are also bringing SNK Playmore’s new 2D KoF game to PAL territories. In a world of bald men with guns, games taking themselves way too seriously, and all this talk of high definition bollocks, it’s really great to sit down and play a traditional 2D fighting game again after all these years. Sure, I still play Street Fighter III, but that’s been out for years now, so to get new 2D games in 2006 is superb. ‘Neo Wave is the latest in the very long running series of King of Fighters (KoF) games that have pretty much been released on every system possible over the years, and in Japan at least, the series is still selling strongly to this day. This latest version uses the now more common 2D sprites with a mix of 2D and 3D backdrops, which for the most part work well together. On some stages the fighters stand out heavily from the backgrounds, but others the blend together really well, and the 3D modeled stages give a nice amount of added depth to the stage. From boot up you are given a choice of no less than forty-three characters to choose from, and there’s a huge range of fighting types on hand too, including some characters with hand weapons. Having characters with a wide range of styles is a nice feature; otherwise with that amount of characters (and there are more to unlock too) you’d have too many that were similar to each other. You can select to play with either one character, or a team of three characters, which you can switch out, at any point in a match. Whilst you are fighting with one character the other characters’ health increases slowly, and there’s a lot of scope for tactics, using weaker characters whilst your best character recharges in the background. Ignition Entertainment and SNK have really gone to town with beautiful presentation. From the Japanese cover art, 60hz video support, and a full colour manual (when was the last time you saw one of those?), it’s really great to see effort like this put in – especially when you think about how many copies of the game they are likely to sell. Along with 60hz, the video options that appeared in the Japanese game are present too such as screen size/position, six character edge sharpness settings, and overall focus controls. So, how does it play? Although I still don’t think the KoF games have quite the same finesse as Street Fighter III, the game plays well. The characters control well, you can connect attacks really nicely, and it’s very smooth. You have the now standard charge meter, which allows you to unleash a really powerful and almost unblockable attack, which fills the screen with colourful effects and generally does lots of damage. There are a few characters in the game which I simply didn’t get on with for one reason or another, but for the ones that did – which was most of them – I found the game very enjoyable in both single player, but more so in Vs mode which, as always, gives the game the most life possible. You can play through the single player in either 1 character or Team (3 character) against the CPU, and there is also a Survival Mode, and a huge gallery to unlock artwork. Overall, KoF Neowave is a really good game, which has loads of characters that will take forever to master, each with pages and pages of moves to learn. There are enough single player modes to play through before you even think about the main meat of the game – playing against your friends, which as always with fighting games, is the best part. Still not quite as good as Street Fighter III, but this is still a highly enjoyable 2D fighting game.

Best Bits
- A truckload of characters with lots of fighting styles
- Plays flawlessly - you really feel connected to the characters
- Fantastic presentation all around

Worst Bits
- It’s not quite got the same amount of depth as SFIII
- Maybe too many characters?


by: DC