How I learned to break a c-c-c-combo and love Killer Instinct – Reader’s Feature

GameCentral’s fighting game-themed weekend continues, as one reader insists that Killer Instinct is just as good as Street Fighter.

The spring of 2016 without a doubt holds much excitement for fighter fans. Not since the nineties, when the PlayStation’s Tekken traded blows with the Saturn’s Virtua Fighter and, later, the Dreamcast’s SoulCalibur, have platform holders used the fighting genre as cudgels in the fabled console war. It’s amusing that the recent renaissance of the genre has seen such camaraderie between platform holders, developers and publishers, with few console exclusives, plenty of back-slapping interviews and even a high profile crossover in Street Fighter X Tekken. The resurrection of one-on-one violence celebrated with a hail of niceties.

That changed when Sony won exclusivity for Street Fighter V and Phil Spencer puffed his chest out like an indignant Battletoad and said defiantly, ‘But we have Killer Instinct!’ In the next few months these two fighters will go toe-to-toe for our attention in a blaze of eSport-aspiring, cross-platform brawling, six-button fury. One thing seems certain: Killer Instinct will lose…

But (and this a huge but, the kind of which you’d usually see on the final boss in Earthworm Jim), Killer Instinct is an astonishing fighter worth anyone’s time and worthy of being spoken of in the same breath as the legendary Street Fighter series.