Fun role-playing beat’ em up gameplay | First Impressions - The King of Fighters ALLSTAR

The King of Fighters ALLSTAR, or KOF ALLSTAR, is a mobile beat ‘em up game mixed with RPG and gacha elements.

It borrows from the 20-30 years of King of Fighters history and characters, combining them together to create an Ultimate King of Fighters game tailor-made for mobile devices. It was also officially released for PC last year as an emulated-port.

The game's story follows a group of fighters who are brought together to compete in a tournament known as the King of Fighters. Along the way, they must battle a variety of opponents, most are basic henchmen, others are KOF characters with their own unique abilities and fighting styles as well. The game's narrative format is told through a series of 2D cutscenes and skippable dialogue in-between missions, which help to flesh out the characters and provide context for their motivations.

The gameplay in The King of Fighters ALLSTAR is a mix of beat’ em up and a bit of tactics/strategy. Players must build a team of up to three main fighters, supported by three more as “strikers” and use them to battle against enemies or other teams. The battles take place in real-time in a side-scrolling manner, and players must use a variety of attacks and combos to defeat their opponents.

The combat is simply addicting and made relatively easy to control. One button to attack, another to dodge, and another to block. Then the rest are entirely the abilities that the characters have. Combos and hits are satisfying to perform, especially when the enemies are constantly bouncing around the maps.

At first, you start with just one fighter, then the more you play, the more you unlock character cards, which you can now equip as fighters. When using multiple fighters, you can seamlessly switch between them as long as the cooldown is up. You can also assign a “striker” fighter for each fighter that you can all in to do occasional support attacks alongside the player..

The missions themselves are saga’s adapted from the classic games and contain different chapters with missions. The initial saga, the Orochi Saga, is composed of eight chapters and the first half is beatable in a single seating. However, the difficulty spikes up halfway through it and you’d have to do a bit of grinding before you can progress further.

In terms of its RPG mechanics, The King of Fighters ALLSTAR does a good job of balancing character progression with challenge, and the gacha elements more or less just supplement the system, not completely take over it. Players can earn experience points and level up the fighters in-use, which increases their stats and unlocks new abilities.

KOF ALLSTAR combines elements of a fighting game and brawlers with role-playing game mechanics to create an engaging and addictive experience for fans of the series, as long as they’re fine with the change to a beat ‘em up format.