SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy

SNK’s female-only fighter lacks the complexity of its older brethren but can be a glitzy over-the-top fun time if you let it. Fanservice hides a fun, simple to grasp fighting system that is deeper than you think.

It’s almost heartbreaking how much fun SNK Heroines is, because all of that fun is wrapped up in a fetishistic presentation that didn’t need to be there in the first place. By putting out a cool, casual-friendly fighting game that happened to only have a roster of female characters, SNK could have reached a wider audience of people and rekindled some of the magic they made 18 years ago with Gals’ Fighters. Instead, though, SNK put Mai Shiranui in a cowprint bikini and gave Terry Bogard breasts, alienating a massive amount of people in the process.

I had a blast with the female fighters of the arcade era. It’s a great brawler and the whole Super Smash Bros. element works a treat. There’s definitely enough depth and wackiness to keep things interesting – at least for as long as you have others to play against.

Bad North feels a lot like a mobile title in terms of its limited scope, tight focus, and simple controls, and that makes it a fantastic fit for the Switch in portable mode.

SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy is a female-only beat 'em up, but the results don't work extremely well; special moves are too easy to execute, but SNK Playmore did the right thing by allowing 2-player tag battles.

If you’re new to fighting games - or you’re simply in the market for something that feels like a bona fide arcade fighting experience - there are few titles as easy to pick up as SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy. Its busty and over-sexualised characters might not be to everyone’s taste in 2018 - and the use of Dream Finishers definitely won’t be of appeal to purists - but look beyond the garish colours and there’s a tag-team brawler with real potential, not to mention plenty of hilarity.

For what it's worth, SNK Heroines is a fun fighting game with (local) multiplayer options but, like so many fighting games, lacks a real single-player hook. I suspect your enjoyment of this game will depend on whether you have a stable roster of real-life friends because it seems like online play is currently borked. Maybe they can patch it? There are DLC characters coming down the pipe, so the roster will improve but there’s not a ton of reason to keep coming back for solo play.

This is a casual fighting game where SNK heroines come together, and while it may succeed in serving that purpose, the game’s main modes and graphics are far from ideal.

SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy is not going to reinvent the fighting game genre and it certainly lacks content and feels too superficial but it also manages to be fun and appealing to fans of SNK fans and features good amounts of humour that will keep the game enjoyable, especially when it comes to the characters' interactions with each other.

While SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy has the potential to be a fun hunk of cheese and fanservice, ultimately it relies too much on the game’s premise to carry things. The core tag team gameplay isn’t anything bad – rather fun and unique, even – but extremely short matches, a lack of variety and uneven AI means that said gameplay never achieves its full potential. Only the most diehard SNK fans may want to pick this one up, and even then, odds are you’ve seen these femme fatales done better in both gameplay and sex appeal in previous fighters.

SNK Heroines is the Japanese company’s bet starring its famous girls with an all new battle system that will satisfy all of its players and that also focuses on the customization of the characters. This is, indeed, a fan service type of game.

SNK Heroines Tag Team Frenzy isn’t going to wow you. It’s not going to blow you away with its depth or visuals, or just about anything really. It is quite fun though, at least in small doses.

While SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy is accessible to anyone who may want to play it, its limited roster and bogus 3D models don't do the heroines justice.

SNK Heroines Tag Team Frenzy tries to be a versus fighting game for everyone, including new players. Unfortunately it fails in seducing the experts of the genre by including an unsufficient amount of content.

We expected more from a game that ended up being too focused on ‘fan service’. The roster is great, but the gameplay isn’t deep or complex enough.

SNK Heroines shows some solid gameplay, but it severely lacks content and provides poor fan service.

In its current state, SNK Heroines is worth buying on PS4 and not on Switch.

SNK Heroines is not even close to being a great game. Almost every part of the game could be better, beginning with its combat system and ending with its lack of game modes.

SNK Heroines is all about the silly fanservice, but it's at the expense of having a satisfying combat system and any real depth.

SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy was created with a specific audience in mind, and if you’re not in that audience, you can do much better. The fighter just isn’t particularly enjoyable to play, with a tepid combat engine and poor Switch performance.

SNK Heroines is a weird spin-off of KOF XIV that aims at the male audience by selecting the female protagonists of the game. But the gameplay has been ruined for the sake of accessibility, and the oversexualized leftover has us still puzzled.

Overall, SNK Heroines: Tag Team Frenzy suffers the same problem that many of the most recent fighting games have: barebones content. The character selection is small, with more characters planned to be added via DLC, but the brief story mode and unsatisfying combat put a permanent hamper on the experience regardless of increased roster. There just isn’t much here in the way of fun or fanservice, and the Switch version runs at a shoddier framerate to add insult to injury. The fun little nods and imagery do not make up the overall price tag, and the neutered controls feel far more unconventional then streamlined. Everyone should just put their clothes back on and sober up, because the mood just isn’t there this time.