Tweet
Fighting games are hard. For many they're impenetrable. Sure, you can do a hadouken; that quarter circle forward motion is ingrained in the psyche of most gamers of a certain generation, but beyond that? Well, things get complicated. And online? Forget it. Destroyed in the blink of an eye bruised by yet another meaty dragon punch.So we come to Killer Instinct. Finally, a Rare classic made modern by the power of next-generation processors. But then, as more information trickled into view, reality bit deep down into our rose-tinted euphoria. For all the wide-eyed producers Microsoft's swollen Redmond-based Studios operation could throw at it, for all the passion veteran designer Ken Lobb could infuse in the project, and for all the feedback Rare, the creator of the original Killer Instinct housed half the world away, could send in emails read at the end of the British working day, the principal developer of Killer Instinct was Double Helix, creator of Silent Hill Homecoming, G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra and, er, Battleship.
Oh, and by the way, it's free-to-play, but you have to pay to buy characters. In a fighting game. I remember thinking, on the plane home from E3 in June, what a disappointment Killer Instinct would surely be. And yet, against all odds, Microsoft has produced a fun fighting game with a smart business model that's well worth a download after you unwrap your fancy new next-gen Xbox.
Read more…
More...