Samurai Shodown
Slicing through to the core
After the success of The King Of Fighters
XIV, we had assumed that SNK would revive more of its classic properties, but for some reason Samurai Shodown came as a bit of a surprise. We’re not entirely sure why, mind you – the original games were popular in the Nineties and SNK is renowned for producing fighting games. Perhaps we were expecting Metal Slug instead. In any case, Samurai Shodown is a series reboot that the producers would like to crack the esports scene, an ambition that shows SNK is beginning to catch up to the modern market. We think there’s every chance that it could take off, too.
For a start, the game is more pleasing to the eye than SNK’S last couple of fighters. While the slightly low-budget look of The King Of Fighters XIV hasn’t completely been eradicated, the team has chosen a stylised look that helps us overlook the odd simple background model here and there. Besides, quite often the game does dazzle – there is certainly no shortage of flashy effects to accompany moves, with the occasional bit of camera direction that recalls the zooming camera of the original Neo Geo game. There’s plenty of blood too, which stains characters during fights and serves to highlight the violence, without taking centre stage in quite the same way it does in a Mortal Kombat game. Fans will be pleased to note that the background music is appropriately understated, following series traditions, with the use of classical Japanese instruments.
SNK’S recent games have been pretty generous with content – The King Of Fighters XIV had loads of characters and SNK Heroines offered a wealth of customisation options. Unfortunately, Samurai Shodown breaks that trend with a perfunctory and relatively unambitious set of features. A reasonable 16 characters make up the standard roster, with 13 returning favourites and three newcomers, but they’re at least diverse both visually and in play style. The story mode – essentially an arcade mode with a few cutscenes sprinkled throughout – offers a traditionally infuriating final boss
to tackle, though we had far more trouble with some characters than others. Other single-player modes include regular time attack and survival outings, a gauntlet mode in which you fight every character one after another, and of course a standard versus mode.
The most interesting single-player mode on offer is the Dojo mode, which offers the chance to take on AI ghost representations of real human players, essentially enabling asynchronous battling. Since we were playing an early copy, very little data was available for us to test this out and some of the online ghosts behaved quite oddly, but our own ghost seemed reasonably accurate. Multiplayer modes are limited to versus and online fights, and again we weren’t able to test online thoroughly.
So what’s left to carry the game is the fighting itself, and this is where Samurai Shodown excels. SNK has recognised the fighting model that made the previous games work and preserved it – for the uninitiated, this means major damage from few hits, so a single heavy attack can wipe out as much as a third of your opponent’s life bar. The result is that Samurai Shodown is a fighting game about the fundamentals, where the manual dexterity needed to perform combos is far less important than knowing when and where to strike. If you leave yourself open with an unsafe attack you can expect to be punished heavily, especially as the game is rich with defensive tricks – Just Defense blocks return from previous SNK games, as do momentary dodges.
On the offensive side of things, regular special moves are handled as you’d expect but the super moves are a bit different. The rage gauge functions as it does in previous games, filling when you receive damage and providing a temporary damage boost when full. While it’s full you can attempt a weapon flipping attack, a hugely damaging move that disarms your opponent, but your window of opportunity is brief as the gauge will automatically drain after a while. You can sacrifice the rage gauge for the opportunity to land a ‘Lightning Blade’ attack – a single, enormously powerful attack that can wipe out well over half of your opponent’s health in one go – but once you’ve attempted that, it’s gone for the rest of the match. Super special moves are similarly limited to a single use per match. In a welcome move, inputs for these attacks have been standardised across characters, so there’s no chance you’ll forget them.
The result is that Samurai Shodown’s fights always possess the kind of tension that most fighting games can only offer at the end of a closely fought round. It’s not a particularly fast-paced game, but rounds can be decided in under ten seconds thanks to the high attack damage, so every action takes on heightened significance – especially as you have so few chances to land your most significant moves. Dramatic comebacks are eminently possible, and you can never feel truly safe. These highrisk fights don’t just convey the danger of sword fighting and spirit of the series, they set the game apart from just about every other fighter on the market.
In a nutshell
If you’re looking for a lot of singleplayer variety, Samurai Shodown might not be the game for you, but we love the emphasis on tactics and timing over execution. For fighting fans with a competitive streak, there’s nothing else quite like it.