REVIEW: SNK GALS' FIGHTERS


Title	SNK GALS’ FIGHTERS
Developer	SNK
Publisher	SNK
Release Date	April 29th, 2020
Genre	Fighter
Platform	Switch
Age Rating	E10
Official Website

SNK GALS’ FIGHTERS released on the Neo Geo Pocket way back in 2000. This game featured female fighters from various SNK games and they would have to combat the dangerous Miss X to acquire a talisman that would grant any wish. This is basically the prequel to SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy that released on consoles back in 2018. The real question here is does this cute 2D fighter with only 2 buttons have any depth? Let’s find out.

The graphics here are very simple, but honestly the sprite work is top notch. The backgrounds are animated and you can tell lots of love went into them. Even with the limited color palette of the system they still look great. The character sprites are all done in a super deformed style and look adorable! The animations during combat are smooth as silk. I know some top end fighting games today that would love to have this buttery smooth feeling when folks play them. Character portraits have a bit more color than other parts of the game, and I love the style they used for them. They fit the characters well, and the over the top nature of the game.

The music in SNK GALS’ FIGHTERS is OK. It’s not gonna blow you away as the greatest chiptunes you’ve ever heard, but they sound pretty good given the hardware this was made on. The sound effects are really simple and mostly hit noises as your moves connect with your opponent. They add a good sense of impact to the game even if they aren’t elaborate effects. I’m really impressed with what the sound team did here in this regard.

The game features a few modes – Q.O.F mode, versus and training. The versus mode has an awesome hidden feature where you and a friend use one Switch console in a cocktail machine style mode, allowing two players to duke it out on one Switch with a one pair of Joy-con controllers. Q.O.F mode will take you through to story of each of the gals. You can select an item you have collected from previous playthroughs at the beginning of this mode. They have various power up effects that will aid you on your quest. Well most of them do, like the earring and hairpin. Many do nothing. The gals each have very different wishes if they win and some of the endings are quite comical. The interactions each character has with Miss X are golden as well. I was entertained with each of these quite a bit.

There are quite a few neat features in this version of SNK GALS’ FIGHTERS including the ability to play the 2P mode “cocktail” style like this. You can enable it by syncing each joycon as its own controller and then in the middle of the 2P menu/mode, connect them to the console. pic.twitter.com/QKRYDyoFKq

— oprainfall (@oprainfall) May 1, 2020

SNK GALS’ FIGHTERS gameplay has a shocking amount of depth for such a small fighter. The game uses pretty standard controller inputs to pull of special moves, and even on the Switch’s junk D-Pad these work really well. It is very easy to chain together some impressive combos and juggles with just a little practice. Each girl has two super moves that can be pulled off when their Gal Gauge is full at the bottom of the screen. This fills when you deal or receive damage like in other fighting games. This is the most fun I’ve had with a fighter in quite a while, and it proves that quality can some in very small packages.

SNK GALS’ FIGHTERS does a lot of things right. It’s a solid and fun fighter that is easy to pick up and play, but has enough depth to keep you entertained for a while. The extras SNK included here are multiple borders, scanline filter and a zoom feature that lets you customize the look of this anyway you wish. The game looks great on a normal TV docked as well. The scanned manual they included was great and I felt that was a nice touch to cap off this great package. For the price of $7.99 I feel like fans of SNK will have a good time with this one and folks looking for a cheap fighter that packs a lot of punch should snag this one up as well.