The time traveling tournament fighters are back! The original eight characters from the popular arcade hit return, along with six new characters hand-picked from several different eras and locations all through time. But a new boss awaits the victor... who or what is behind this new tournament? You'll have to get to him to find out! This sequel features all-new stages and music, and improved animation and graphics. You can now reflect projectile moves at your opponent, and reverse normal throws if your timing is right! The original game's Death Match mode is also back, but with a new feature - the life bar will increase or decrease as you inflict or receive damage. Get your side's life bar to 100% and your enemy will lose.
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Not gonna lie, I was actually kinda looking forward to playing this one. I didn’t necessarily expect it to be a masterpiece, cause I knew what it was following up, but since I was able to blaze through the original game so quickly, I figured this one would be a breeze, and I could get it over and done with. However, I then quickly learned that that wouldn’t be the case, and I also ended up learning that, when compared to the original game, this game was an improvement overall. I wouldn’t say it is that great, but it is still a good enough fighting game, one that SNK nuts would probably have a fun time with, and others could probably just shrug off without getting too angry at it.
The story is literally a “here we go again” plot, as Dr. Brown, the one who caused the first game to happen, hopes to once again prove who the strongest fighter in history is, but of course, bad shit happens again, making this feel like one of the laziest plots to a sequel from around this time, aside from, y’know, some obvious other choices. The graphics look about the same as the last game, with them not looking bad, but at the same time, it looks like every other fucking SNK fighting game of that time, the music was ok, with me not being able to recall a single track from the entire game, but at least I don’t recall hating any of it, the control is about the same as the original game, so nothing to comment on there, and the gameplay is very similar to that of the original game, but there is a little more content in there to spice things up.
The game is a typical SNK fighter, where you take control of either one of all the returning fighters from the previous game, or one of the six new fighters introduced in this game, travel across the world to fight at various different locations, with there being quite a bit of interesting choices this time around, fight your opponent in the traditional 2D style, throwing out plenty of punches, kicks, throws and combos to gradually deplete your enemies HP, win two out of three matches against your opponents, and take on a bonus game every once and a while for additional points. It gives you pretty much everything you are expecting in terms of an early 90s fighting game, but there are some changes here that do make the game better.
In terms of actual new content, along with the regular matches of the game that you can get in, there is now also an option to go to a Death Match, which pretty much works exactly like the regular fights, except you are now in an arena filled with hazards and traps, the way you lose works more like wrestling rather than regular fighting, and whether you win or lose depends on you either not getting up in time, or who’s health is over the arrow that is on the health bar. This isn’t my preferred way of playing a fighting game, especially one like this, but I am glad that the option is there, just in case you wanna spice things up with your matches. Aside from that though, not much else about the game is changed aside from the new characters and the difficulty. There are 14 total characters to play as in this game, which is pretty high for a fighter in 1993, and there are some new unique faces to make the cast all stand out, like with Mudman and Johnny Maximum. The gameplay does feel a little less cheap and exploity, the endings that all the fighters get range from being standard to being funny, and this time around, the game is harder to get through. Not as hard as other SNK fighters, but hard enough to where I had plenty of trouble against the final boss, Dio. No, not that Dio.
That is all pretty cool, but at the end of the day, it still doesn’t feel as fun or captivating as plenty of other fighters from around this time. It is still mostly exactly what you would expect from a typical SNK fighter, and it still wears it’s inspiration too closely to its chest, which does bring it down quite a bit. There isn’t really much else that I can say about the game, because it just does feel that bland and basic, which is a step up from the original to be sure, but that does make it less noteworthy as a result. I guess I could also say that there are mistranslations scattered throughout, but guess what? It’s an SNK game. They all have mistranslations up the wazoo! It is to be expected at this point.
Overall, despite having plenty of new additions that do make this an improvement over the original, I can’t really say that World Heroes 2 is anything more then just simply being “good enough”. It is one of the most typical SNK fighters that I have played so far, which is saying something, considering that I have gone through quite a lot of them at this point. I would recommend it for those who were fans of the original game, as well as those who love SNK fighting games in general, but for everyone else, there are plenty of other, better old school fighters that you could try out instead. And before we end off this review, here is a fun fact for ya: one of the fighters that was originally gonna be added into this game was gonna be the emperor Vlad Dracula. That in itself isn’t too interesting, but now imagine if the game had Dracula, the vampire, as one of the playable characters. That would give this game an instant 4-star rating based on that alone.
Game #451
The movement and feel of the fights are finally fixed, it does not feel like you are underwater anymore, and you can properly respond to every attack.
The levels are detailed, sometimes they even react to the player's actions, no matter if you are in the mist of a war, a deep jungle, or in the russian winter.
The characters are still good, the new ones are even better than the original cast. I loved J.Max and the design of Mudman. Brocken and Rasputin from the original are much better here, they feel like proper and useable characters now.
If you enjoy fighting games and you played Street Fighter to the death, go check out World Heroes 2!