Killer Weekend Update: Shadow Counters, Instinct Cancels, And More

Welcome back to another edition of SpawnFirst’s Killer Weekend Update. In this week’s edition, we learn about how to counter shadow moves, what instinct cancels are truly all about and how poor Campbell has the worst of luck. Check the final two screenshots at the end of this post to see what I mean by that. As always, you can watch the stream in full here. For those who can’t, continue reading while I pick apart everything the developers say and give you the most pertinent information on the game.

In the fight, auto-doubles “magnetize” the player to their opponent, whereas when doing manuals, the player must always be aware of their distance from their opponent.

When attempting to combo break, heavy auto-doubles allow for more reaction time than lights or mediums. What that means is that the light and medium auto-doubles are slightly faster than the heavy auto-doubles. Therefore, they are harder to combo break.

Auto-doubles do more damage and have more potential damage than manuals. Manuals are safer but the drawback is a decrease in damage. The risk of safety is less damage. However, you must keep in mind that potential damage depletes over time so you must cash that in with an ender or else all that damage will be lost and gained back to the opponent’s health.

Certain character have unique abilities to increase damage.  Jago can cause a heap of potential damage by following high, medium, low, high, medium, low (which they call an “around the world” combo), then cashing in the potential damage with an ender.  He can do around the world twice, use instinct cancel and then do it two more times if the player wants to.

If you attempt to do a wall bounce combo when you’re not near a wall, the opponent just gets pushed back. However, if you’re fast enough (at least as Sabrewulf), you can dash in for a cross-up (ending up on the other side of your opponent) and do another combo while they’re caught off guard.

The game automatically searches for comebacks or great moments to instantly record, or the player can choose to start recording from whenever they wish.

You can use instinct cancel to protect yourself from shadow counters. Instinct cancel can be used on any special move, shadow move, and ultras. Instinct cancels also reset the combo limit (the bar that shows you when you’re about to drop your combo).

Shadow counters are counters to shadow moves done from a block. Shadow counters cancel the block reaction and go straight into an attack. There’s no invincibility on shadow counters though. Shadow moves all have 5 hits and the optimal time to attempt a shadow counter is on the 4th move. You can shadow counter and then follow up with a shadow move of your own or a regular combo if you wish.

To combo break a shadow move, it has to be a linker or an ender; you cannot break a shadow opener.  To combo break shadow moves, you have to counter 3 out of the 5 shadow moves in succession. For example, Glacius’ puddle punch; if you successfully hit the counter button on 3 of the 5 hits during his shadow puddle punch, you can break the shadow move. Power doesn’t matter; meaning that if the shadow move is high, you can try to break using low kick and punch. To know if you’re doing it right, you can hear the announcer counting out “ONE! TWO! THREE!” If you fail to hit anyone of these, you are locked out.

When a counter breaker occurs, the player is locked out for 4 seconds whereas a regular lockout due to a failed combo breaker is only 3 seconds in length.

Each stage has its own lighting features. There are optimized lighting tricks to each stage to make them as visually pleasing as possible.

The story of the game only remains true to the origins of the characters. This game has its own storyline and doesn’t correlate with the original 2 games’ storylines except for the characters origins.

That’s all for today. Join us again next week for another edition of Killer Weekend Update to learn all there is to know about Killer Instinct.