
Unfortunately both character are aesthetically forgettable surprisingly so. Re-imagined for the current release, Tusk fittingly draws more heavily from Norse mythology in aesthetic and tone, and Kim-Wu has adopted the style of a peppy, rebellious modern age teen. As the previous games were a blatant amalgamation of 90s pop culture pulp, Tusk was basically Conan, and Kim-Wu was your typical nunchaku swirling, dragon summoning martial artist. At this stage almost everyone from the previous Killer Instinct games have returned, Season Three near completely rounding it off with Tusk and Kim-Wu. Bizarrely, Season Three leans on the notion of guest characters over original designs, and doesn’t particularly excel at the returning cast either. As Season Three eases in it’s clear that the well of classic characters is running dry, and almost feels like Iron Galaxy are running out of ideas for original characters. Season Two drew upon remaining classics from Killer Instinct and Killer Instinct 2, and again buffed the roster with new faces, all of which fit in the overall presentation and roster line-up nicely. Season One predictably saw a return of most of the classic characters, while introducing Sadira as a fitting roster addition. Previous seasons have done a decent job of balancing reimagined returning characters from prior games alongside freshly envisioned newbies. Here’s where I found myself a little bit…underwhelmed. If you were to jump into Season Three today, you’d find five added characters supplementing the existing roster. The difference here is that Microsoft has been straight up on how this distribution model works, and thanks to the success of this rebooted Killer Instinct fans have managed to see three seasons greenlit with, I would hope, prospects for a fourth.īut enough of that, let’s get into Killer Instinct: Season 3 and what the currently available content can offer. And hey, it’s not like other fighting games don’t have post-launch DLC updates. By the time you’ve mastered and understood one character, another should be available. I do come from the school of wanting as much content at launch as possible, but the distribution and development method for Killer Instinct is working well. If you are indeed new to this distribution model, both prior seasons followed a similar pattern launch-day content (mainly characters and stages) followed by incremental updates, including new characters, over subsequent months until the season comes to a close. We’re knee deep in the third, which means I’ve had the chance to play around with a handful of ‘new’ characters, though not the entire roster-to-come. Currently developed by Iron Galaxy, off the back of Digital Extremes, Killer Instinct follows a seasonal approach in content distribution. If you’re wondering why, I’ll hazard a guess that you’re not familiar with the modernisation of Killer Instinct.
