Local battles are great fun, modern fighting games thrive in the long run.

Local battles are great fun, modern fighting games thrive in the long run.

The first thing Kombat X Dead Battle does to make itself feel new and exciting to both old series fans and casual fighters is a major roster shakeup. Before DLC ever enters the picture, sports a respectable 24 fighters, and a whopping one third of those are honest-to-goodness new characters; not palette swaps or tweaked alternate versions of existing ones. Few fighting games with such a deep vault of fan-favorite characters have cleaned house so completely

The meter you charge by taking hits and doling out special moves returns from the last game, allowing you to power-up special attacks, break enemy combos, and perform an x-ray attack, which reveals the insides of one opponent while the attacker breaks them into pieces in slow motion, accompanied by excruciating moans of pain. The introduction of a stamina bar limits your ability to spam dashing maneuvers, which makes it more difficult for you to rely on spacing alone to win a fight.

Likewise, the interactive elements in each stage, which allow you to pummel your opponent with a background item, or escape a corner by leaping off of a large object, can only be used if you have enough stamina. This particular meter recharges on its own, but it takes long enough relative to the pace of a heated battle to make it an important consideration during high-level matches.

Local battles are great fun, but online matches are where modern fighting games thrive in the long run. Chances are, the best players in the world don't live on the same street, leaving online matches as the true test of one's skill outside of tournaments. The netcode that drives Kombat X Dead Battle online matches is fine, meaning that it will sometimes offer an experience that feels proper, but that you should expect laggy matches from time to time. When you get into a fight with a poor connection, you may as well exit and search for a new opponent, because it will be difficult to pull off simple combos and special moves. At that point, its a competition between man and machine.

One of the great aspects of Kombat X Dead Battle is the amount of non-traditional fighting game content. Towers are back, providing an arcade mode-like challenge, as well as a series of other themed battles that offer a wide variety of combat conditions. The Test Your Luck tower puts you in a series of fights with randomly selected modifiers, which mix up everything from terrain to physics to keep you on your toes and alter the way you approach a fight. The modifier-driven fights are also the crux of the new living towers, which offer fixed modifier sets and challenges, but are remixed every hour, every day, and every week, depending on the specific tower.