Xbox One’s premier fighting game continues to grow
At last! The final character has been released and the second ‘season’ of Xbox One’s headline fighting game has been brought to a close. It’s been a pretty good year for Killer Instinct, despite a rocky start with Season 1 developer Double Helix Games leaving the series to make something for Amazon and being replaced by Iron Galaxy, which was best known for porting other games. Turns out, it’s actually pretty damn good at making its own, too. Season 2’s new characters make for one of the most interesting lineups of all the current fighting games and, thanks to a big injection of prize money from Iron Galaxy, Killer Instinct is one of the featured games at EVO 2015 – the world’s biggest fighting-game tournament. Not a bad year at all.
Iron Galaxy brought with it a fair raft of changes, almost all of them positive. It cleaned up the look of the game, and added some much sleeker menus and a proper single-player story mode. Both welcome inclusions, but any fight fan worth their salt knows that these are simply nice extras. Trimmings.
The characters are the real meat of the game. Released at a rate of almost one per month since Season 2 launched, they’re a mix of old and new combatants. Four originals – boxer TJ Combo, the Amazonian Maya, dinosaur Riptor (who’s been given a cybernetic makeover) and literal burning man Cinder – return from previous games, with their original movesets being tweaked to fit the core combo system that provides the backbone for this installment.
The newcomers, however, are far more interesting – just listen to these basic descriptions. Kan-Ra is essentially a mummy that can use sand to set up traps and then whip away with his bandages. Aganos is a giant living pile of rubble that can set up walls to bounce his opponents off for huge air-combo opportunities. Hisako moves extremely slowly until she attacks suddenly, much like the movement of the ghosts in one of the thousands of Japanese horror movies her design has been influenced by. Omen is a being of pure energy who can shift form as he fights, while new final boss ARIA is essentially three characters in one. They’re not just different fighting styles – some require almost totally different approaches to how you play the game.
It’s been really interesting to see how the game has changed as each new character has been dropped into it, but now you’ve got the entire roster at your disposal, you’ve got a very different game to what Iron Galaxy was left with at the end of Season 1. For instance, Sabrewulf is a really effective pressure fighter who is at his most deadly when he is right up in his opponent’s face. He has moves that can slide under projectiles and avoid ground strikes that allow him to get ‘in’ on anyone. Kan-Ra, however, is his kryptonite. Any Sabrewulf player is going to have to substantially rethink their approach when confronted with this new matchup. Kan-Ra, on the other hand, finds himself in deep trouble when pitted against original Killer Instinct fighter Jago, who can pressure him with fireballs and avoid a lot of his traps with ease. No new character has been added simply because they fill some kind of fighting-game archetype – they all add depth to the game, and the fact that they’re all so well balanced is a credit to Iron Galaxy’s eye for a fighting game.
Shadow warriors
Killer Instinct borrowed the ‘free-to-play with character rotation’ concept from the ultra-successful MOBA League of Legends, but Iron Galaxy has also co-opted a few other things from other genres for Season 2. First of all, there are the new Ranked Leagues in multiplayer mode. Similar to FIFA’s Online Seasons mode, you play a series of matches against other opponents, earning points for a win. Cross a certain threshold and you’ll be promoted into the next ‘division’, facing stiffer competition from better players. Drop below a threshold after you finish the series of matches and you’ll be relegated. It adds a feeling of importance to every online battle, rather than just competing to reach a higher points total than other players.
The finest new addition is Shadows mode. Again, this is something seen in other games – such as Forza’s Drivatars – where data based on your play style is used to create an AI opponent for you or your buddies to play against. Here in Killer Instinct, your fight data is stored not only for yourself, but asynchronously with other players, so they can tackle the most up-to-date version of your shadow whenever they fancy. These are alarmingly complex clones, with reports of some Shadow fighters even learning some of their masters’ more obnoxious habits – taunting after winning a round and, in the case of one player, ‘teabagging’ his latest victim. This mode is almost certainly set to be Killer Instinct’s legacy – a feature that should be ‘borrowed’ by anyone else planning on making a fighting game in the future.
Killer Instinct: Season 2 has seen what was the solid base of a fighting game realize its potential. Iron Galaxy has come onboard and made the game its own. More than Double Helix. Hell, even more than Rare itself. The free-to-play model is still a good way to get into the game, but with all the extra content on offer, Killer Instinct is now a fighting game worth investing in. Roll on Season 3.