Great game. Terrible version.

This game on it's own is a fantastic fighting game. 50 characters at the start with tons of classics along with a bunch of new faces, colorful stages, deep, rewarding gameplay, plenty of offline content/modes, and all of the sort. Coming from a long time fan of the KOF series, I definitely recommend buying and playing this game...on PS4.

I cannot recommend the Steam version of this game AT ALL. I've had all kinds of problems including random freezing during on online matches, game crashes after online match completion, random framerate drops, randomly blinking menus, laggy matches pretty much 90% of the time, and the list goes on. I also play the PS4 version quite frequently and have rarely ever experienced these problems. Yet on this version, it seems to be constant.

Like I said above, if you have the option to buy this game on PS4, get it there. You'll have a much more smooth, non-glitchy experience. Plus, since this version lacks mod support (for whatever reason), there is even less of a reason to buy this version over the PS4 version. Get this version if you don't have another option. But, be warned. There are problems.

UPDATE:

The PC version of this game actually feels worse than it did before. Constant freezing during online matches and on loading screens between rounds, terrible lag, crashing, etc. WTF? This is awful. Like I stated above, don't buy this on Steam. Get the PS4 version if you can.

It's a waaaay easier game to get into than KOF13, but it also isn't nearly as nice to look at, and it's also a discord-fighter. Can't understand why it's still so ridiculously expensive even now that KOFXV is about to come out, terrible business sense. Bought it for next to nothing someplace else.

Shame, KOF is great and I'm glad I own the game, but I can't recommend it.

Might need think twice about getting this otherwise great game if you use an AMD GPU. I got some nasty crashes and had to force shutdown my computer while playing this in order to continue using my computer.

I hate this game, for more reasons than I'm able to list here. But, here's a few:

1) Combat feels incredibly clunky. Detection for proximity normals is borked, you can get far normals after landing a jump-in attack right next to your opponent and it'll completely throw you off. Character position detection is messed up too, characters will jump and the arc makes it look like there's no way in hell they cross up, but suddenly they just teleport behind you. To add insult to injury they'll then land in front of you, and it's not like this is some sweet set up, this kind of ♥♥♥♥ just happens. Throw ranges are incredibly short, combined with the modern trend of having slow walk speeds. Every super causes a hard knockdown that just grinds the game's pace to a halt.

2) The combo system in this game is wack for 90% of the cast. Some people call it "accessible," I call it boring. Wow, confirm into MAX into EX move, into another EX move, and then a normal special move cancelled into a super. That's basically what every single character in the game does, and boy is it dull. What makes it funnier is that there are STILL people who complain about the difficulty. Then there are the useless auto-combos, which are useful for...nobody. It doesn't help beginners since they're just too ineffective, and they're almost completely useless for higher level players. In fact it hurts because you can no longer use s.A as a chain cancellable poke into itself.

3) The trial mode is a joke. Even with this game's relatively simplified combo system, the trials don't even explore half of what most characters can do, and that already isn't a lot. The other modes are lackluster. Story Mode is just a glorified arcade mode with a few dialogue sequences here and there, and does anyone really care about things like Time Attack and Survival?

4) Netplay is completely hit or miss. Sometimes you can have a decent match with someone on another continent, sometimes you can't play with a friend who lives in the same city. There's all kinds of bugs, ranging from the game's framerate just being inexplicably slowed down, lobbies not working properly, crashes, freezes, the whole 9 yards. At least in concept the lobbies fine, when they work they're simple and functional.

The fact that SNK still charges $60 for it is just ridiculous.

It's okay, but you should really just get kof13 instead. You'll save money, time, and your eyesight.

I love this game and this series. However, this doesn't live up to the franchise.

The series always had charm.
Bring back taunts. Bring back special match intros. Let me see the outfit preview.

I'm not here cuz KOF is a fighting game. There's a thousand fighting franchises to choose from. I'm here for the SNK charm.

It's just another fighter now.

Great Game! but this is an awful port that crashes constantly, before, during, or after matches with shoddy netcode on top of that.

No ones online except few Chinese, if you are from the west it's impossible to play against them because of lags, this is not Rollback.
No crossplatform, and no possible to play against people on GOG version, the gog version is dead anyyway.
The only person on the leaderboard on GOG is SNK test team...
On steam people are still playing but it's less than 20 most of the time.
If you live in East Asia you should'nt have problem to find a player with a good connection, if you are from here and like KOF or Fighting games, go for it (on discount).

The package of the DLC are good enough and less greedy than capcom.
The gameplay is more easy for new players but with more jaggy animations.
Kyo model is bad.
Some new characters like the "chūnibyō" shunei, are "ugly" characters and heavily dressed in gadgets and loose clothing, trying to have a serious tone like Sasuke with children cloth(do you remember when you imitated superman with your coat when you were a kid?), i'm sure Shunei is listening to evanescence on his headphones while fighting, they look like edgy OCs on Deviant art...

The game overall is pretty good and unique.
Rock Howard is Back, that's cool.

The price of the game is too high when you know that XV is coming Q1 2022 and nobody is playing XIV, the discount is still kinda high for what looks like a low budget fighting game from 2017.
Return to KOF 2002/98 for now because of the empty online and lack of rollback.
And waiting KOF XV, they announced rollback with some old characters like shermie(who look like a play doh model on trailer tho).

Game: 9/10

Port job: 4/10

The game itself is great if you like fighters. Definitely check this out. However, the developer behind this port job Abstraction Games did a terrible job here.

This game had a closed beta (only available if you pre-ordered to sucker you in) that lasted a little over 3 weeks until the game was officially released. And all of the issues I'm about to list were present during the beta and absolutely nothing was done to fix these issues:

NETPLAY IS VERY HIT AND MISS. Sometimes you find a great connection and sometimes you don't. This is because the idiot developers at Abstraction decided not only to not add Ping numbers and replace the incredibly inferior bar system for network quality. But even in a good connection it will lag on occasion. Which is unacceptable.

THE BARS DETERMINING NETWORK QUALITY ARE WILDLY INACCURATE. You could play someone at 4 bars and the connection is unplayable. Underwater. But you could play someone at 2 bars and it's fantastic.

THERE'S SCREEN TEARING. The only way to maybe fix it is adjust the settings on your video card and hope that fixes it. As for me it didn't and it's very distracting. Screen tearing happens during pretty much any movement from characters.

OTHER BUGS AND ISSUES. The game might lock up on you. It still might crash. I've had it happen twice tonight where it didn't recognize my keyboard at all and I had to hit the Windows key and select the game for it to recognize the keyboard again. Other's have been reporting that the game doesn't even launch for them.

Abstraction Games chose not to listen to customers and these are the consequences. Online is pretty dead right now if you live in North America. I implore SNK to not re-hire Abstraction Games again and do their PC port jobs in-house. I honestly think Dot Emu could have done a better job (yeah, I went there). Because I was watching Steam Database for this game during the beta and saw maybe 1 person in-game (for the Steam edition not the closed Beta). And Abstraction didn't work on weekends either. It wasn't until the last 7 or so days until release Abstraction added more people to work on the port.

And you know what they did instead of fixing all of the issues customers had? They added support for obscure controllers and joysticks instead. Get your Sega Saturn pads ready. Abstraction and one of the reps from SNK have yet to address any of these issues that should have been fixed during the beta.

Stick to Tekken 7 guys until this port is fixed. And Abstraction Games has personally been added to my Crap List.

Sometimes bugs happen. Sounds disappear. Controller not working very well at the beginning. There is no play in online mode.
But gameplay is good. There are a lot of skills like street fighter ex 2 plus