The King of Fighters 2002 Unlimited Match – Review
The King of Fighters (or KOF for short) has always been a big competitor for the Street Fighter series, in terms of mechanics, visuals, and its overall feel. While fading more and more to the background over the years, Capcom took over the more traditional fighting genre, letting others run free, with KOF slowly being forgotten. Nonetheless, the series still stuck around, with its fifteenth entry to be released soon. For now, we’re having a look at a classic entry in the KOF series, which has been slightly modernized and re-released on the PlayStation 4. As this is basically an old-school game that has been slightly modernized, we’ll just dig into what matters and keep it somewhat short.
It’s clear that this new rerelease focuses heavily on online competitive play, as you can play ranked matches, outside of the normal match mode online. The offline capabilities do not come with a proper arcade mode or a story mode. Of course, there are a few tiny blurbs at the end of a battle, which have that early 2000s cheesiness to them. You can see that certain screens, and even models, have been updated. Sadly, the bars on each edge of the screen are quite annoying to have.
Other than the regular online capabilities, you have the mode to play in a single-player format, where you only pick one character, rather than compose a three-man team. This is easy if you wish to get some practice runs in with certain characters, or just don’t want to experience the longer matches. The game is quite annoying in its controls, however. Just like the original SNK games, it did not have a back button in the character select screen (or at least none that worked for us). You basically cannot undo a wrong choice, and that can be somewhat lethal.
The overall game feels authentic to the series, and the small sprucing up that has been done is quite appealing and makes this game more relevant again. Even though it still uses the foundation of the old game, it feels fairly modern. Of course, ‘fairly modern’, does not mean it’s on par with actual modern games.
Conclusion
This iteration of the 2002 KOF game will not bring that much new to the table of those who enjoyed the original game casually. Those who were playing this in a competitive circuit, and wish to be surprised by new elements in an old-school game, will very much enjoy this. Players who have not had the chance to experience this classic, and are also into these types of retro games, will also have a field day with it. The game balances old-school gameplay, with renewed artwork, updated mechanics and great online support. This makes this nearly antique game a very nice entry in our current bland fighting game landscape.
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