‘Queen of Fighters’ has arrived, featuring the ladies of King of Fighters, in a brand new fighting game by SNK.
The story of SNK Heroines is unveiled throughout the story mode, this is comprised of 6 matches with exposition scenes in-between. Our feisty females have been brought into this altered dimension in order to battle one another (Similar to Mortal Kombat in a way). A hooded figure named Kukri makes his presence and intentions known to the ladies, whilst also serving as the final boss within the story mode.
The modes which are included are; customisation, story, arcade, and online. Within customisation, you utilise the points earned by playing through the other modes in order to unlock additional costumes, accessories, and voices for the girls. The story mode is basically six tag-team matches with each girl having their own ending cut-scene. Arcade mode has a few additional modes within it, such as versus, survival, training, and tutorial. Online is where you can play against others online in more tag-team matches.
The gameplay is unique and very simple with easy to perform commands. Beginners will find it very easy to just pick it up and play, regardless of experience. Pressing Square or Triangle does a weak or strong attack, respectively, while Circle performs your special move. There is no need to do a combination of directionals plus punch to pull off a special attack in SNK HEROINES Tag Team Frenzy. Instead, it’s been simplified to one-direction plus Circle, or just Circle. There are also no crouching attacks, so defence is made simple with L1 guarding oncoming attacks.
Veterans may be put off a bit if they’re looking for a deep fighting experience, but SNK HEROINES Tag Team Frenzy is a nice change to the fighting genre. It offers simple combat without having to memorise a tonne of moves and combos per character.
Another unique turn within SNK HEROINES Tag Team Frenzy is that simply attacking the opponent is not enough to win. There are two gauges that are present, one is health while the other is stamina. During matches, special moves require stamina which regenerates as the fight goes on. As your health bar decreases, your stamina bar increases, giving you a chance to fight back. Once your opponent is down to a red bar of health, you need to execute a ‘Dream Finisher’ in order to finalise the win. A ‘Dream Finisher’ is a special move done with R1 which depletes a large amount of stamina.
If you don’t have enough stamina, you need to keep attacking and waiting for the bar to fill. I’ve had matches where normally I would have been defeated but they didn’t pull off a Dream Finisher, giving me a bit of a chance to redeem myself and turn the fight around!.
During fights, you are always in a tag team. However, SNK HEROINES Tag Team Frenzy forces you to have a shared health bar, so swapping out your character with low health will simply replace them with someone with the same amount of health! The perk behind bringing in your partner is that they have their own stamina bar. It becomes a strategy of swapping characters to utilise specials and ‘Dream Finishers’ rather than swapping them out in order to preserve health.
Whichever character is in standby will regenerate their stamina as they stand on the sidelines, which can make matches go by quickly once you learn to swap at the right times.
Official Trailer:
Final Conclusion:
Overall, SNK Heroines Tag Team Frenzy is one of the simplest pick-up-and-play fighting games I’ve played in years. The gameplay is very smooth with it’s nice and easy gameplay that’s quick to get used to. The girls all look great and being able to customise them adds variety to your team without being just a colour palette swap. Best yet, you don’t need to pay real money (DLC) in order to swap colours and styles around, as you would in other games out there these days.
A copy of the game was kindly provided for review purposes
SNK HEROINES ~Tag Team Frenzy~
The Good:
- Easy to pick up and play
- Quick matches
- Customization of all the characters
- Mai in a cow bikini
The Bad:
- Can't swap costumes between characters
- Fighting veterans may not like the basic controls
