For those of us who played Double Helix Game and Iron Galaxy’s Killer Instinct (2013) on release, it’s almost hard to believe that just yesterday the high-octane combo heavy fighting game celebrated its 10th anniversary, and to celebrate the event Iron Galaxy is going to drop patch rebalancing the game along with another major announcement on their anniversary stream.
The gist of the patch is that Iron Galaxy decided to prioritize balance, and take a few of the top tiers down a peg while giving a bit of love to the more underpowered characters on the roster. Characters such as Jago and Kim Wu received mostly buffs while other characters like Aganos and Fulgore primarily received nerfs.
But the patch is just the tip of the iceberg, as revealed on Iron Galaxy’s blog, Killer Instinct’s anniversary update also brings two versions of the game to all platforms: A free base version, resembling Killer Instinct’s launch version with a very limited roster but still more than enough to really sink your teeth into the mechanics, as well as an Anniversary Edition for $29.99 which features the all 29 characters of Killer Instinct’s full roster as well as all the premium content they’ve ever released for the game.
In addition, this Anniversary Edition is now the definitive version of the game, meaning previous versions of the game you have available on Xbox or on Steam will be retired and upgraded to the Anniversary Edition for free, which is a welcome change.
All in all, it’s good to see a game that has been carried by its community for so long finally receive support from its developers again as well. At EVO this year there was a Killer Instinct tournament that was received very well, and along with this Anniversary Edition not to mention the fighting game revolution that’s been happening lately, one has to wonder if these announcements are maybe testing the waters to see if the fighting game community will be open to another entry in the Killer Instinct series.
But whatever the future holds, we know that for right now you can enjoy Killer Instinct’s Anniversary Edition on Xbox One, on PC for Steam, and now Xbox Series X|S.