SNK Playmore

Beauty in Motion

HIGH Absolutely gorgeous animations and figures.

LOW Bosses that combo cheap moves over and over.

WTF As a newbie to the series, some of the female animations. Srsly?

Just End it Now

HIGH Unexpectedly cutting my enemy in half, blood cascading to the ground.

LOW The wretched music in the Wild West stage.

WTF The Engrish of "The Crimson Murderousness" and "Handing Sword Princess."

One More Verse, Same as the First...

HIGH Great animation.

LOW Brings nothing new to the table.

WTF The stunningly dull, unimpressive final boss.

Dan is right on the money in saying that the lack of extras in Metal Slug 4 & 5 is very disappointing. This is my third review of a Metal Slug title for GameCritics, and over the last few re-releases, the decline in value for each game has been fairly obvious.

So, that's it? Really? Maybe it's just me, but it seems that in this day and age people expect more from a port of an arcade game than just the arcade game. Twelve years ago SNK could get away with this sort of thing. While home consoles struggled to put more than 32 colors on screen at once without major framerate issues, the Neo-Geo offered lavish arcade-quality graphics for a paltry 200 dollars per game.

According to ESRB, this game contains: Blood, Violence

The King of Fighters: Maximum Impact seems to have come from a bizarre parallel dimension; a parallel world where there was never a Virtua Fighter, or a Tekken, or a Dead or Alive, or even a Battle Arena Toshinden (the now-forgotten game that first made "changing the axis" into a workable 3D fighting game mechanic). Maximum Impact doesn't just feel like first game in a new series; it feels like the first game in a new genre. Unfortunately, though that genre has actually existed for more than a decade now, SNK just seems to be completely unaware of it.