Launching itself into the world of 3D, SNK’s King of Fighters (KOF) series has joined the fray of modern 3D fighters, managing to make substantial changes from previous instalments, meanwhile capturing the core essence players are familiar with. With a brand new story, 3D models, and a host of DLC to tide players over, all signs look positive for the Ultimate Edition of KOF XIV – however, this is not quite how it plays out. Despite some remarkable strides taken by the developers, the game certainly falls flat in several areas. So, how exactly does KOF XIV fare in the arena of 3D fighting games? Well, let’s take a look.

KOF XIV Ultimate Edition is a re-release of the 2016 instalment, and comes packaged with the base game, as well as all DLC characters and costumes. I’ll mention these extra add-ons later on, but the primary focus here will be on the base game – KOF XIV. The game is essentially split into three core areas: story mode; tutorial/training modes; online multiplayer, and I’ll tackle each of these elements, before breaking down the gameplay mechanics and other key areas. We’ll start with the story, as this is the mode I certainly have the most (and least) to talk about.

Story (Spoiler Warning)

Simply put, the story mode included in KOF XIV is abysmal. I’m well aware that many fighting games, and to be honest most games with online functionality, forego single player content in favour of a greater focus on multiplayer. This is fine, however what irks me the most about KOF XIV’s attempt at a story mode is the sheer lack of effort put into contextualising it. Despite opening with a gorgeous and promising cinematic, players will be thrust into 10 consecutive fights (with a single cutscene midway through), before the story wraps up with zero explanation. Bearing in mind your opponent AI is mediocre at best, being thrown from fight to fight with absolutely no idea why you are there simply divulges into and endless grind of auto-combos and boredom. You’ll find yourself suddenly pitted up against the current King of Fighters, with minimal build-up, before a (totally unexplained) demon-thing appears, resulting in you apparently saving the world… from a threat that had appeared 5 minutes earlier. Roll credits. Honestly, the inclusion of this mode as a ‘story’ is an insult to every narrative designer to have ever lived. Had SNK decided to completely remove the story mode, that would have been fine. Had they openly placed players in a challenge mode instead, that also would have been fine. But what SNK had opted for is both lacklustre, and blatant content-padding. Frankly, there are many more issues I could point out with this mode, but I’ll leave it here on one final point – don’t bother playing it.

Side Modes

With the horrors of the story mode out of the way, let’s talk about the remaining single player content of KOF XIV. Training and Tutorial modes, a staple in any fighting game, come as expected, both giving beginners a chance to learn the ropes, and more experienced players the platform to hone their skills. There is not much to say about these modes – they will be very familiar to anyone who has played a fighting game – but I will note that I found the UI quite unfriendly for beginners. Disclaimer, I’m by no means an expert on fighting games, however I’ve played my fair share of them, and so probably sit somewhere in the middle in terms of experience. Nevertheless, being told to press ‘HP+LK’ for example, meant absolutely nothing to me without looking up the button list in the options menu. Granted, this isn’t the biggest of flaws, but I do think the inclusion of controller keys in the UI would have gone a long way in improving accessibility for new players. Aside from this, both modes are comprehensive, and are a great way to learn the plethora of combo moves available. The Missions mode is a surprise hit in KOF XIV, as one would expect a list of meaningless challenges, with no real value outside of beating your personal best. However, I found these a great place to practice combos, and become more familiar with each fighter’s move-pool, whilst simultaneously striving towards a greater goal. I’d definitely recommend players check out this mode, even if it is only briefly.

Multiplayer

OK, here we are at the bread-and-butter of KOF XIV – multiplayer. Your standard range of modes are all included: ranked; non-ranked; local multiplayer, and so you’ll get what you’d expect upon entering multiplayer. Connectivity was fine for me (provided I was playing someone in the same, or similar, region), and I had little difficulty playing an opponent once I was in a match. However, this part is important – once I was in a match. Playing in 2021, the player-base of KOF XIV is astoundingly small, ultimately meaning I could only find a match in non-ranked rooms, which often only had 3-4 players in them. Considering you often cannot jump straight into another match, as you are dependent on an opponent joining your match (or finding an open one yourself), this results in more time spent waiting for a match than actually being in one. Ultimately this is the major issue with the online multiplayer – there’s almost no one to play with. Nevertheless, I will note that once you do find yourself an opponent, multiplayer can offer you the very best of what KOF XIV has to offer.

Gameplay

As previously mentioned, KOF XIV has made a sizeable departure from previous series’ entries, breaking new ground in the world of 3D. Nevertheless, SNK should be applauded for maintaining sharp, frantic gameplay, ensuring that the core of the game is neatly polished. With a huge roster included, creating your team of three fighters can feel fresh each time, as each fighter offers markedly different move-pools. This is a standout feature of the game, as it offers players an endless supply of content as they learn to perfect each fighters’ combos, and build their ultimate team. Once in the fight, fast and fluid movement allows you string together these newly-learned skills, and the inclusion of the rush mechanic certainly helps tip the fight in your favour when you need it most. Admittedly, the learning curve of KOF XIV is a steep one, but as with all great fighting games, it is the mastery of each fighter that provides the player with a sense of reward that drives them back into another fight. I do wish there was a little more, outside of the rush mechanic and auto-combos, to give beginners a chance of said mastery, but those dedicated to the cause will certainly reap their rewards.

Audio & Visual Design

Although the audio design of KOF XIV is nothing to write home about, with some decent backing tracks and suitable SFX, the visual design has plenty to note. I personally found SNK’s foray into 3D to be a successful one, with character models, fighting stages, and visual effects all looking sharp, albeit somewhat lacklustre considering the console generation. Much more could have been done in this regard, as I feel like SNK play it safe with much of the visual effects, however overall I was satisfied with the game’s visual design. I would expect KOF XV to make some notable improvements, but considering the base game came out almost 5 years ago, I have little to complain about. Lastly, considering how beautiful they were, I would have loved to have seen more cinematics throughout the game, as these almost always managed to ramp up my anticipation before a fight. However, that would require me to start again on the story mode… *shudder*.

Ultimate Edition Extras

Anyone already familiar with KOF XIV might want to know why they should opt for this version, rather than just the base game. Well, in truth, I can’t really give you an answer. Yes, you’ll get 8 new fighters, as well as a handful of new costumes to match, but that’s about it. New players probably won’t see the value in this, whereas fans of the series may wish to consume every drop of content they can. If you do find yourself falling into the latter bracket, then by all means, the Ultimate Edition may just give you what you had been wishing for. But the rest of us, these extra tidbits do little aside from prompting an “OK, cool”, before getting lost in the already existing pool of content. Ultimately, as with most ultimate editions of games, the extra content is great if found on sale, but often they are not worth paying extra for.

Conclusion

So, in 2021, is it worth picking up KOF XIV? In all honesty, no. With an appallingly-bad story mode, and notable absence of online opponents, there is really not much content to justify a purchase. Yes, the gameplay is fantastic, and these other flaws are not indicative of that, but simply put, you’ll be getting a very empty game. Waiting on KOF XV would likely be your best bet, but if you do opt of the 14th instalment, you will still get a fighting game with sharp, fast-paced and rich gameplay. Nevertheless, although I do have to hand it to SNK for their successful attempt at entering the 3D fighting game market, considering the other options available, I find it difficult to recommend KOV XIV over them. Who knows, maybe KOF XV will continue to build on the foundations laid here, but that awaits to be seen.

Rivalling N++ for the crown of worst video game title of all time comes Injection π23 ‘No Name, No Number’, a survival-horror game that pulls no punches with its painstakingly difficult puzzles and terrifying soundtrack in an homage to the Silent Hills and Resident Evils of old.  

Set in Malaga, the unnamed protagonist has his dog stolen from him, tipping him over the edge and forcing him to leave the relative comfort of his home – into a zombie apocalypse. Unfortunate, I’m sure you’ll agree.    

In typical survival-horror fashion, you’ll need to find items, unlock doors and solve puzzles to find your way through to your goal. Simple enough, you’d think, if it wasn’t for the fact that these required items can’t be clearly seen in the environment, meaning that you find yourself running along the walls of the room hitting ‘X’ in attempt to find something – anything – to get you into that locked room. Not exactly my idea of fun. 

Some conventions have changed for the better in video games over the years, like a game’s ability to save automatically for one, but Injection shuns that for save points with a twist – a puzzle that needs solving. Puzzling by modern standards, this counterproductive ‘feature’ is incredibly frustrating, especially considering the challenge the game’s puzzles already provide. It’s almost like you’re being nostalgically trolled.

Perhaps the game’s biggest flaw is its failing to provide anything of substance to entice the player to continue beyond the first chapter of the game, making me wonder how many people gave up on it within the first few hours. Injection’s slow start does improve as you begin to pick up your weapons, but even then you are restricted to just a few enemy types and very few bosses to speak of throughout the entire game. 

If that wasn’t reason enough to get you to dig out and dust off your PS1 and play the original Resident Evil and Silent Hill, the graphics and animation of Injection’s enemies are PS2 standard, which makes it hard to feel afraid of them as they hover about rather than provide any jumpy movement or suspense by appearing out of nowhere. They can attack you through walls and doors and disappear for no good reason though, which is impressive I guess.  

So little excitement does this game inspire that it’s quite difficult to know where to begin when describing areas in need of improvement, but its generic cutscene-driven story is exempt, getting a free pass for it’s genre-standard plot, until its cutscenes revoke it, looking like a VHS cassette tape has been put through a blender. Notes littered around the levels that might have added to the story are mostly in English, but are occasionally in Spanish, without any English subtitles, which also doesn’t help the conveyance of the story. Above all though, it’s the lack of any real communication between characters, or even with yourself, that makes the game feel one-dimensional – you don’t even get to see your dog until the end! Who’d have guessed the zombie game would be lacking life.   

Attempting to offer respite from the mediocrity surrounding it, the game’s decent features exist through its puzzles, which vary from lock picking, code-breaking to item crafting; the detailed, but relatively empty environments, and the effective soundtrack which mostly consists of monsters moaning. Wroooaahhh.   

Despite all its failings, it’s clear that a lot of love and care has been put into this project by its one-man developer, with plenty of collectables and extra features available, but with it not being cheesy enough to pull off ‘so bad, it’s good’, Injection exists only as a hardcore fan’s guilty pleasure, with its below-average production values and lack of variety creating a functional but dull game. 

Waves Out is small game about using magnetism. I hesitate to classify the genre as I’m not sure what it would be. In the game you have to transport spheres to goal holes as each world gets progressive harder. Each level has around three rounds with a timer counting down. If you don’t get enough spheres in the holes in time, you have to restart.  

There are three different ‘worlds’ which have four levels each, but they’re just slightly varied versions of the same level. That coupled with the rounds makes the game very repetitive, even with the variance. The last two levels somewhat deviate from this, but I doubt most people will get to that point. The score goals are way too easy to achieve for almost the entirety of the game, so much so that I often found myself standing around in the last round as you can continue to score even after you’ve achieved your goal for that round. Not only that, but each level has up to three stars you can get for extra spheres and I got all three half the time. There are also powerups to help, but they’re not really needed. There are also goals that offer two times or four times points, but you again you don’t really need them. 

The time trial idea really holds the game back, discouraging you from even going to collect powerups. Towards the of the game at the last two levels there’s an attempt at a longer level, but I’ll tell you that getting stuck in the floor on the third part and having to restart from the beginning of the level all over again was pretty frustrating. The game would have been better if there was no time component at all and instead a set number of spheres needed to open up the next part of the level. As it stands everything that gets added to increase the difficulty it either not fun or doesn’t make the game that much harder anyway.  

That’s about all there is to the game. There’s a two-player mode, but I doubt you could get anyone to play this with you. There’s also a time trial mode, but the core gameplay makes it not worth playing.  

The only good thing about this game is the magnetism idea. Even then, I not sure if the way I’m using it is intended, as I often mash the button to keep the spheres sticking to me without overloading, although you do need to hold the button down for a bit to drag spheres up slopes. The fact that you have to walk over them to activate them before putting them in the goal is fine, but like everything else in the game the challenge of it is basically irrelevant most of the time. 

Overall, I wouldn’t really recommend this game to anyone unless you really like magnets for some reason. The game’s short, the gameplay’s boring and there’s no story. I could also mention other things like how the music in the main menu isn’t very good and a couple of the glitches I saw, but I think you get the picture.  

“Decisions, decisions, decisions”

A psychotic killer has a knife to a hostage’s throat and time is winding down. You have 10 seconds. Do you try to talk to, or shoot, the killer? That’s the kind of breath-taking choice this Kickstarter-funded point and click adventure Tokyo Dark -Remembrance- forces upon you, granting freedom with a moral-testing catch.

As Detective Ayami Ito, you chase the murderer of your police and life partner in a gripping investigation that uncovers death and tragedy, exposing Tokyo’s dark underbelly in the process. Choice is the greatest toy at your disposal in this interactive piece with numerous options available for nearly every task, all of which have an effect on you and the surrounding characters. Moral dilemmas abound, you’ll be staring at the screen for minutes on end deciding the best course of action, humming and hawing as you decide who you want to become. As you make these decisions, a stat-based system called ‘SPIN’ will update (which includes levels for Sanity, Professionalism, Investigation and Neurosis), which not only keeps you accountable for your actions but gives you immediate feedback to see how your actions have affected Ayami. This will have you planning your next move without even knowing what the game will throw at you next and completely immersing you in the story.

Ayami is on paid leave due to the traumatic experience of seeing her partner murdered in front of her and is given medication to improve her mental state. Taking said medicine will improve her sanity, but her investigative ability lowers. Ignore the medication entirely and your sanity will slip to dangerously low levels, with characters referring to how bad you look, and blurring the screen in front of you. 

The beauty of this choice-based structure is that if you head down the morally-corrupt route, Ayami will justify it, making you become the result of your actions and the maker of your own destiny. Will you be conscientious and law-abiding, brutish and murderous, or somewhere in between? The sense of freedom created by the seemingly endless combination of choices, in just 5 short hours, is incredible. Eventually, the story is narrowed down to a few of the available 9 endings based on your stats, adding yet further reason to pay attention to them.

Helping side characters – like debt-collecting for a Yakuza boss or winning a toy for a distraught girl from a UFO catcher – allows you to further your investigation, and despite the game’s length preventing much character development, they all serve a purpose and add to the story in some way. There’s also a clear attempt to include as many ‘uniquely Japanese’ aspects as possible, from Otaku culture to Yakuza and host clubs.

Creating a much larger context than just the protagonist chasing the killer, the story provides thought-provoking and philosophical musings to its universe while the killer brings psychological mind games and the occult to the fray, pushing our main character’s sanity to the limit. Its soundtrack might push yours at times, with its terror-inducing tracks increasing in volume and intensity that’ll have you flinching at the images flashing up on the screen.

The game’s visuals, with its basic anime-esque character and environment designs, are unremarkable, simply conveying the story’s tone and purpose without attempting to add anything innovative to the mix. There are also animated scenes, but they seem like inclusions added at the last minute to meet a Kickstarter stretch goal rather than having any real contribution to the title. In addition, the running animation of the main character is slightly off, as if it’s been forced to fit a purpose it wasn’t suited for, jittering despite the fact you’re walking straight forward most of the time. These are all minor issues though and don’t in any way marginalize the strengths this superb game brings to the table.

Like all great visual novels, the experience is highly memorable and affecting, and one that I can’t wait to revisit. The fear of what your choices might mean for your character is something you won’t easily forget, especially as the developer ensured that autosave is active during your first playthrough, meaning you have to live with your decisions. A stroke of genius on their part. This eases up in New Game+ though, where you can manually save at each juncture and adjust your choices to your heart’s content, adding a great deal of replayability.

Tokyo Dark -Remembrance- is relatively narrow in its offering, but is excellent in its execution. A masterclass in suspense, this game is one of the few Kickstarter projects that has lived up to its promise, providing a tremendous experience for those not only in its demographic but also those new to the genre.

All aboard!

Many of the kids from my generation share the same experiences when it comes to trains. We watched Thomas the Tank Engine with glee and we played with wooden train track sets to build the tracks of our dreams. If I was able to tell 5-year-old Wyatt that there will be a game that comes out in 27 years that lets me become a train conductor, I would have been absolutely excited.

Sitting down and playing the game as a 33-year-old man now, my feelings are quite different. The game Dovetail Games put together should be an absolute blast for the right crowd. But, Train Sim World 2 is not a game that I would recommend for the casual gamer.

Grab your conductor hat

The base game gives you three very different railways to roam. You can choose from the Sand Patch Grade: one of the steepest railways in the United States, the Schnellfahrstrecke Köln: the German train superspeedway that lets you hit up to 185 mph, and my personal favorite, The London Underground Bakerloo line.

You start in the AC4400CW engine at Sand Patch Grade to learn the ropes. Upon settling in, you immediately notice that this train has more buttons than a teenager’s backpack from the 1990s. Thankfully, the game’s narrator – a pleasantly-spoken British gentleman – gives you the lay of the land.

I methodically made my way through the tutorial. The game is fairly generous in giving you the history and the basics of running the engines, but there are many buttons and knobs that are never explained. This never came to haunt me in game situations, but it would be nice to have the option to learn more.

The gameplay itself is fairly simple when broken down to the core components. Control your throttle and brake, deliver freight or passengers, and complete collect-a-thon tasks. Or you could blow the steam whistle for a minute straight, say “I wonder what this switch does”, flip the switch, and cause your engine to come to a grinding halt to fail the scenario.

The game handles about as well as you could expect on a controller. You look around with the right stick, select objects with the face buttons, and control the throttle and brake with the bumpers. It’s very clear the game was originally created for PC with the level of precision needed to select objects. But overall, the developer did a decent job of adapting the game for console.

The frustrations and joys

A few situations frustrated me when I had seemingly done everything I needed to do but the game would not recognize the task completion or move forward. I may not have been doing something correctly, but the game provides no in-game hints outside of those original tutorials.

In one unintentionally comical situation, the task before me was simple enough: hook my engine up to some boxcars to move them to a nearby station. I connected everything together but could not get the engine to reverse. After trying everything I knew from the tutorial, I stepped out of the engine but forgot to apply the brake. I accidentally uncoupled the engine from the boxcars, and, like Usain Bolt in a 100M dash, the train took off. I ran about one-hundred yards trying to catch up. But as the train shrunk over the horizon I realized that my (virtual) boss was going to have my hide.

Catch the sights and sounds… but not too close

I was disappointed with the sounds in this game. If you are not paying attention too closely, you may not notice any issues. Like most of the other problems with the game, the more you pay attention, the worse things seem. While the horn audio on the Sand Patch Grade engines loops seamlessly, the Schnellfahrstrecke and Bakerloo very abruptly cut out. Various other in-game sounds either do not terminate when they should or do not play at all. These are the things that take me out of the experience.

The game is hit or miss visually. I was surprised by the amount of texture pop-ins and low-fidelity assets despite playing the game on an Xbox Series X. The scenery and engines look beautiful at a quick glance, but once you start focusing on the railroad tracks, the passenger models, or the inside of the London Underground, the game starts becoming very low-rez, resembling last generation games. However, the weather effects are amazing. Watching rain bounce off the windshield of the engine traveling over 100mph looks phenomenal.

You may want to give this game a chance if you are a fan of trains or a simulator aficionado. If you are into fast-paced or arcade-style games, take a pass.

Train Sim World 2 is currently available on the Microsoft Store for $29.99. Try the previous entry, Train Sim World 2020, for free on Xbox Game Pass Ultimate.