As you can clearly see from this DOA 4 interview, fighting game fans are just a little bit out of control. Not that there's anything wrong with that. Hell, it pays to be so damn passionate, but at the same time, these people are the only ones that are going to notice the new features and improvements in SNK's latest brawler, King of Fighters: Neowave. The changes are so subtle it's easy to completely miss what SNK is shooting for, and the result is a game that looks and plays exactly like its predecessors...that is...unless you eat, sleep, and breathe fighting games, or more importantly, you know your shit.

Before playing the game, I went to EBGames.com to get the skinny and immediately heard violins. KOF NEOWAVE, a 2D revolution for the franchise and fighting genre comes to the Xbox Video Game System with improved graphics and an enhanced game system, featuring full Xbox Live support.

Wow! That's a lot of PR BS to swallow, but SNK didn't do a good enough job cramming it down my throat. I popped this bad boy into my Xbox and what I saw reminded me of the 400 KOF games that I've played the past several months. Improved graphics? Not exactly. More like pixilated sprites set against backgrounds that are a mixture of 2 and 3D visuals, and considering what I've seen from fighting games in the past, that's nothing new. Forty three characters? All right. I'll give them that. There's quite a large assortment of fighters to select from including Joe Higashi, Chang, Iori, Mai Shiranui, Billy Kane, and Robert Garcia. Some of them are awkwardly balanced and way too powerful, but I'll take them all.

The big problem is the game doesn't necessary play better than its predecessors. There are special stipulations that you can choose from before a match (cancel special moves, enable attacks that render guards ineffective, and enable a Max 2 move whenever the power gauge turns red), but by and large this is the same KOF that I've been playing ever since SNK began releasing them on the Xbox, and it doesn't matter whether the backgrounds are better looking or the character animations more fluid because it's the same damn game and I've grown tired of it, especially because of the options, which are just archaic. Team Play, Team Vs, Single Play, Single Vs, Endless (fight a never ending stream of opponents)...blah, blah, and more blah, or eh, eh, and more eh. It's all the same, and not even Xbox Live play can save it, because even that doesn't bring anything earth-shatteringly new to the table. This is just an incredibly bland product.

Fortunately, despite its vanilla appearance, KOF Neowave is still a good game, which is why I decided to give it a 3/5. It's certainly not exciting, nor should it cause anyone to do any back flips, but this is still a pretty mean fighting game that features hard hitting 20 plus combos, attractive character art, plenty of cheesy (so cheesy it's cool) music, and a wealth of characters to select from. It's also $19.99, and when manufacturers decide to release a game at that price it says to me that they're well aware that this product is by no means a hot ticket, but it's at the very least entertaining on some level (either that, or they're saying there's no way in hell that anyone will buy this for $40 or $50). So with that being said, I'm willing to meet SNK half way on this.

What I'm not willing to budge on are the controls. Microsoft's Controller S just doesn't work well with this game, as the d-pad fails in almost every respect. The left analog stick does the job, but I'm not so sure the dedicated fighting fans will want to use that. But then again, dedicated fighting fans probably own arcade sticks, so for them this won't be much of an issue. I, on the other hand, think the controls suck.

Buy KOF: Neowave if this is the first KOF game that you've ever played, or you're an SNK/fighting fan that wants to complete the Xbox collection. But if you don't fall into either one of these categories, definitely pass this one by. It's fun, no question, but it just doesn't have enough appeal to make it desirable a week or two after it was purchased. There's just not enough to come back to, and in lieu of the other games being released this month, coming up short doesn't cut it.

Looking for more info? Then check out SNK Playmore's official website