About The Streets:
King of the Streets is relatively simple 2D fighter that has tons of potential, looks nice, and needs an additional year of beta-testing and tweaks. I want you to know that even though this is a ‘do not recommend’ and a large part of the review is negative, I actively want to see more work from the developer. The reasons I got this game are (almost) all reasons worth getting if you share them: aesthetically speaking, this is a game about a sorely under-represented, and oftentimes, misrepresented culture and people. 3D models may not be everyone’s cup of tea but I genuinely love the way this game looks, especially the backgrounds and the old school CRT filter. This game also has a great OST that’s perfect for a fighting game. Conceptually, there’s some genuinely good ideas that, with fine tuning, would make an easy and fun little fighting game for anyone to get into. So, that’s the good. I like the way it looks, and I love what it is, conceptually. The other reason I got this game is that I love supporting indie fighting game devs. It’s a tough genre to design for. Unfortunately, KotS is lacking in all the areas that matter for gameplay. Just a quick list of simple cons: -There is no support for arcade sticks, or at least not a TES+ which I know a lot of people have and use for fighting games. – Combo counter is broken and will pretty much tell you everything is a combo (eg. Sweeny f.HK into itself over and over again is counted as a combo. It is not, it is a very slow jumping overhead.) -There really isn’t enough hit stun to make most things a combo, even though this game has a cancel system that I rather like (rapid fire lights to make a light>medium chain, and heavies have thier own dedicated button, so in /theory/ characters should be able to do LMH>Whatever. But… they can’t. Because there’s not enough hitstun) -Command Grabs can circumnavigate this problem /sort of/, but most characters don’t have them. B-PAC is a great example of demonstrating this, because he can do 2LK5LK>Command Grab, and since there’s not enough hit stun off of the 5LK cancel on hit, he just gets the command grab for free. Same for block stun, really. B-PAC rocks. + (I’m gonna sneak a positive in here, because B-PAC also has a OTG grab AND a crouch grab shining wizard, and i genuinely feel like his stuff looks cool as hell. He’s a great example of what this game COULD be if the game were mechanically tightened up) -In general I’m not a fan of whiff canceling in 2D games, but I could accept it in this if it were implemented properly. I rarely see any game implement properly, though, and this is another one. -/+? There’s glimpses of quality of life that i really appreciate—like the fact that training mode shows hitboxs, for example. It’s really shocking, if I’m being honest, to see such a player friendly polish in this random part of a game otherwise missing them. – Crouching hitboxs are QUITE short, and end up making many special moves and normals whiff. Since overheads also don’t have enough hitstun to lead to combos, and the damage is quite low on individual pokes, there isn’t… a ton of reason not to crouch the majority of the time. There’s more, but I think you get the gist. I have a feeling $20 is way too steep for most people given the problems outlined above (compare this to, say, the polish of Punch Planet, which is still in Early Access, made only by three people, and still quite complete when compared to KotS) but I also hope people continue to support the developer (particularly in feedback!) because I want to see this game’s style, and the mechanically parts of it that work well, developed further. In short, I bet Field Magic’s next game, or next big update, will be great. Or, at least, I think they /can be./
