While many ports of modern fighting games have translated very well on iOS, such as Street Fighter IV: Volt and King of Fighters i-2012, the older titles in the genre haven’t carried over so well. Titles such as Street Fighter II Collection, Marvel vs. Capcom 2, Ultimate Mortal Kombat 3, and SoulCalibur are plagued with sub-par controls, limited feature sets, shortened character rosters and unreasonable pricing.
As someone with a soft spot in my heart for the Samurai Shodown series, I was really hoping that the Samurai Shodown II port to iOS would buck that trend. I should have known better.
To its credit, it looks and plays like I remember it. The full roster is in there and it looks gorgeous. There’s slowdown at times during the more intense moments, but if memory serves me well, this was also true in the original game. Personally, I don’t think the gameplay holds up as well as its retro fighting game contemporaries, though there’s fun to be had here, especially for fans of the original. Unfortunately, things go downhill from here.
This port only has two modes: Arcade and Versus. If you want to play online like you can in Street Fighter IV: Volt or King of Fighters i-2012, you’re out of luck, as multiplayer is local only via Bluetooth. Arcade mode is also wonky, as I found that toggling any of the 8 available difficulty settings didn’t actually make the game noticeably easier or harder.
Controls are crucial for any fighting game, and this one only goes half way towards optimizing itself for the platform. Its joystick is as responsive as the one found in the best iOS fighters, but the critical SP button is under-utilized. Instead of allowing it to control all of your character’s special moves, it inexplicably only handles a few, which leaves you to manually input the rest manually. Also, super moves must be implemented manually, rather than mapping them to touching the super bar. With the complex motions that come with most super moves in this game, you’ll fail at pulling these off more often than not.
Worse yet is a problem I hadn’t really encountered in an iOS fighter before. Due to the nature of the source material, there are a number of maneuvers that require you to hit two or three buttons at the same time. On a fightstick, that can be done with multiple fingers. On your phone with such a small amount of real estate to work with, this is problematic, regardless of how you arrange the buttons on the touchscreen.
It’s a shame that the mobile trimmings for Samurai Shodown II are as lackluster as they appear here, as they would have gone a long way to strengthening this package. Instead, it’s an overpriced package that is thin on things to do and needlessly difficult to control.
In Third Person 