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Thursday, September 6, 2018

SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy Review Ladies Like To Fight

We first got to try this one at Anime Expo and were beaten to shreds while looking at the lovely ladies of SNK in silly outfits. The game doesn't get more thoughtful than that. It's a total Japanese silly idea for a fighter and yeah they could have made it sillier.

SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy has you battling it out in matches of 2 on 2. So, after looking over which girl looks the silliest or most appealing, you"ll team them up to kick @ss. Now the ladies who aren't in the main foreground of the fight are sent to the back and will be rooting for you. They'll be sending you special items you collect and activate on your own to help you. Things like a pinball that wacks your opponent, explosives and of course a metal pan that falls from the sky, the classic Japanese joke.

If familiar with SNK games your eyes might drift into nostalgia as you"ll see girls from their games, games you've probably played. The numbers of those ladies were whittled down to 14, so not the largest roster. One of the most controversial choices was a female version of Terry, silly, yes. People were pinning for some of the girls from Metal Slug or other series.

When looking at the drawings of the characters while choosing them, you"ll kind of wish that was the art style chosen for the game instead of the CGI. It's hard not to just like the drawings more than the look of the actual look of the ladies in the game. We think of it as a missed opportunity as the game is basically at 2D fighter with 3D fighters.

Gameplay was not easy to learn and pick-up. We suggest going through the tutorial, which doesn't take much time at all to learn how to perform different moves. Yeah, it's a simplified fighter with a one button finisher called Dream Finish. And yet, it still can get hard when it comes to the boss fight in the game. The only way to end a match is weakening your opponent until their health bar is in the red and then performing a finishing move on them. It's hard to grasp to do this every time and makes fights go a little longer than needed, even with on screen text saying it's time for the finishing move.

For someone who plays many different fighters it's still a bit strange to remember you have to do a super move to end the match.

Fights themselves are a flurry on screen, a lot is happening and it's hard to tell what's going on. We thought we would get more gags out of the game with it's silly premise. For more things to both ogle and laugh at.

The story is some creep has made pocket dimension, kidnapped hot girls from different places (SNK Games) and is forcing them to fight if they want to leave. When they lose a match their sadness powers up the dimension. It's your average Japanese subplot for a video game.

Cut scenes in story mode, which only last for 6 matches, are very short. Some of them are just ogling your characters as they talk to themselves.

This adds to the game being for a certain gamer as one mode is seemingly to just take pictures as you can buy different poses, clothes, emotions and backgrounds for each girl. It doesn't change anything about their fight style or powers. This is just a mode to play around in a pose they girls like toy models.

We did enjoy getting the girls into different outfits and modding them. We wanted even more mods though, it's not that large of a collection. We remember playing the recent Tekken game and seeing some of the same mods like adding wings or outfits to characters and just remember a much wider collection to choose from.

If the game is suppose to be blasting the male ego with hormones their should be a lot more to keep it going. I thought maybe outfit damage would be a thing or sillier attacks might pop up. It's a fighter that doesn't fully embrace its perverted Japanese culture.

SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy
Out Sept 7, 2018
Switch Version $49.99

Game provided by publisher for review purposes.