The Karate Kid: Street Rumble Review (Switch eShop)
Wax-on lyrical
by Tom Massey · Nintendo LifeIn the wake of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge, squat, cartoony, sprite-based scrolling beat 'em ups seem to be very fashionable. The forthcoming Toxic Crusaders is going for a similar look, Double Dragon Gaiden: Rise of the Dragons was uncharacteristically cutesy, and now The Karate Kid: Street Rumble features a cast that look like they rolled out of a Gashapon vending machine.
That said, the aesthetic effort here is quite accomplished. Set in a pastel-hued mid-'80s Reseda, California, while locations are rather plain initially, they quickly improve as things progress, with one of the best-looking arcade centre stages we’ve seen in a while. The spritework is excellent, too, with cool characters who are both well-formed and animated, and have a nice finish in terms of colour casting. The pixel art is a far cry from the cutscene art, anyway, which kind of sucks.
In the belt-scrolling arcade games of old, sprites could dominate up to a third of the screen height. Modern widescreen efforts, like this, often adjust to the extra screen space by keeping the characters small and crowding the screen with antagonists. Collision detection and hit-boxes are fine, although you need to be very close owing to your character’s restricted range. You can repeatedly tap the button for a basic light combo, and there are hard attacks that, for Daniel at least, come in the form of a spin kick or the famed Karate Kid crane kick. You can tag hard attacks onto the end of the standard combo, or, when waiting to strike, hold down the button for a couple of seconds to charge up and deal more damage.
You can also double-tap dash, juggle a little, flying kick, and use the hard attack button to charge briefly in the air and crash down on roaming heads. Grabbing enemies allows you to smack them several times, disappointingly represented by a series of standard jabs rather than a flashy takedown routine. From a grab position you can also throw enemies in either direction by pressing a button. It feels a tad confusing at first to have a push mechanic rather than the classic directional over-the-shoulder throw, but you get used to it quickly enough, and it’s very useful for crowd control. Finally, the shoulder button allows you to unleash a super attack to pummel away encroaching groups, its controlling gauge on one hand built through successful combat, and on the other reduced by taking damage.
There are four characters to choose from: Daniel Russo, Mr Miyagi, and the love interests from Karate Kid I and II, Ali and Kimiko. Although they are all highly stylised compared to the original cast, the designs look great, and they actually offer enough diversity (despite having the same key functions) to make trialling worthwhile. Some are quick and rounded, like Daniel, others are slow but strong, like Kimiko, whose hard attacks and special moves have quite the whack.
Progressing through the 12 stages is fairly straightforward, and each features secondary objectives for completists like ‘Finish an enemy with a special attack 15 times’, or ‘Don’t take any damage’. Your chosen character will level up, too, in an end-of-stage score tally, which makes your special moves and combos flashier and adds an extra notch to the attack sequence. To boost this faster, you can technically play the first three stages through on every difficulty setting, from Easy to, say, Very Hard, to increase your power somewhat before going forward. It’s all a little too easy, however, and playing on Hard mode isn’t really hard enough. People who want a real challenge will need to kick the gear up to No Mercy, where if you’re caught in a crowd you can get comboed out of a life bar real fast.
Karate Kid: Street Brawl never really achieves adrenaline-fuelled pace, but it’s still fun to work through if you like the source material. In a genre that’s famously repetitive in nature, it’s crucial that the combat feels satisfying for long-term play; and while Street Brawl works well in bursts and you can mix up combat routines a fair bit, it's dulled somewhat by weak sound design and a lack of interactive objects.
Visual feedback could have been improved, too. You can build enormous combos, because the cooldown period between strikes is one of the longest we’ve ever seen for the genre, but the combo counter is inexplicably shrunk into the top left corner, meaning you rarely see it unless you look for it. With so much available screen space they could easily have had a glitzy ticker slamming on for some much-needed visual reward.
We like the idea of the parry button, but it's quite difficult to know when it's been engaged successfully, especially without a prominent visual-audio trigger. As such, it doesn't really come to the fore as it could, although there are some wind-up routines by larger enemies that help to prompt your timing. The hit-sparks look okay, but the blows could have been amped up in places. Destroying obstacles around the screen sounds like a feather landing on a windowsill on a summer’s day, and, as an aside, those obstacles tend more often than not to hold absolutely nothing, only occasionally having a health drop or increasing your super bar. Inexplicably, there are no weapon pickups or objects to throw about, which seems like an obvious missed-trick.
We don’t want to be overly dismissive. Despite some areas for improvement, Street Brawl is well-formed for the most part and enjoyable to smash through. Replaying a lost stage doesn’t feel particularly motivating should you lose your three allotted lives, but unless you're on higher difficulties this is a rare occurrence. It doesn't come close to the variation or pacing of Shredder’s Revenge, but is definitely improved when played in multiplayer. We really can't understand why there's no online multiplayer mode, however, which is a real oversight for this type of game.
Conclusion
For those who enjoy the Karate Kid movies and Cobra Kai TV series, there’s fun to be had with this. It’s simple but fairly effective, looks really nice, and has a few minigames to break up the action. Its combat can be an enjoyable economy of building gauges and pounding out super attacks amidst tap combos - but it tends to simmer rather than cook. The boss battles (with mostly Johnny Lawrence) are a little too placid for our liking, although the set-ups are pretty cool, especially when you find yourself in familiar movie territory. On the whole, it's nice to rumble with hordes of high school bullies, but once it’s finished there’s not a great deal to encourage repeat plays except the local multiplayer. Wax on, wax off, it’s up to you.
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