Hunter x Hunter: Nen x Impact

Some of this would be forgivable if the game was being flogged at a budget price, but it’s pretty expensive for what you get.

Hunter x Hunter: Nen x Impact is a dodgy fighting game with oversimplified mechanics, a thin roster, and barely any game modes. As far as full-priced modern fighting games go, you can do far better with almost any other game.

Hunter x Hunter: Nen Impact is a bit of a mess, despite some fun being present throughout. If there were better visuals, more content, and less exploitable gameplay, it would be a blast to play casually, but what’s present is simply a bit too busted to really get into.

Hunter x Hunter: Nen x Impact felt like an experiment in a few ways. For me personally, it was a chance to just play a fighting game based on an anime I had no history with, going in just on the basis that it was in-part an Eighting jam. Unfortunately, I had a miserable time with this game. It’s an awkward to play, bland offering with poor netcode and a bare bones single-player experience. On the other side, it seems like the developers experimented to see if a low-budget fighting game could succeed using a popular IP and the growing popularity of tag fighters. In the end though, I feel like this game is liable to be almost instantly forgotten by both the fighting game community and Hunter x Hunter fans. Bushiroad Games have sadly added another stinker to Eighting’s inconsistent past, and certainly made this brawler think twice before I give the benefit of the doubt.

Once you get over the initial shortcomings, Hunter x Hunter fans will find plenty to like about Nen x Impact, which clearly has a reverence for the source material.

Overall, Hunter x Hunter: Nen Impact is not a terrible game. It has a fair bit of content, responsive controls, decent gameplay, and is, in general, a passable fighting game. That said, with its horrible online, terrible and unbalanced roster, the atrocious Story Mode, and its overinflated price tag, it’s not really a game I can recommend to anyone. If you’re a really big fan of fighting games and this game goes on a deep discount, it might be worth checking out. Otherwise, it’s best to steer clear of this game, move on, and never look back.

This game simply disappoints. Its story mode is shallow and the single-player modes lack depth. The combat system is—despite its simplicity—promising, but it suffers from a serious imbalance between characters and mechanics like the Rush Combo, which easily allows for automatic combos, kills the player's motivation to experiment with more complex mechanics.

Hunter x Hunter: Nen x Impact is the series' first globally released game and brings fun 3v3 gameplay with strong presentation and solid training tools. However, it's held back by questionable design choices like awkward offline modes, a lack of motion inputs, an 8-button control scheme not friendly to arcade stick/hitbox users, and no cross-play. It's completely out of step with modern fighting game standards, and while the game does have potential, it needs major updates to fully satisfy both casual fans and competitive players.

Hunter x Hunter: Nen x Impact has potential in its gameplay, and it's possible to have fun with the freedom of its combo system and how distinct the characters are from one another. However, fighting games need an exciting presentation to keep players engaged. Add to that the technical issues, lack of content, limited character roster, problematic online, and the extremely high price, and we end up with one of the most disappointing fighting games of this generation.

Hunter x Hunter: Nen x Impact doesn't really value the rich material it adapts, resulting in limited narrative structures and mediocre visuals, but the traditional 2D gameplay and accessible controls, even without any creative innovation, make the experience fun enough to give it a try.