Back in the days where arcades ruled supreme, it was all too common to see a beat-em-up where one bad dude was beating the tar out of everyone in sight. Kung Fu Strike The Warrior’s Rise embodies this ideology, with an iron fist. You play as General Loh, a man that begins this tale tasked with capturing a temple to help fight a rebellion. Soon though, it’s obvious that there is more than meets the eye for our hero, and a quest of vengeance ensues. This quest has you fight with various enemies from monks and animated statues to rooftop battles with samurai and vixen ninjas.
Kung Fu Strike attempts to combine old school feel with new age mechanics yet has mixed results. The fighting can feel anywhere from a clunky mess to a perfectly choreographed dance. Tutorials are wonderfully woven throughout the first few levels, but I feel like it didn’t teach me much. After the tutorial was over the game ramped up the difficulty like a sudden punch to the face.
Most of the difficulty seemed artificial, with enemies given more health rather than a change in tactics. This wouldn’t matter too much if the game didn’t seem to nudge you toward going back and playing the same levels for more currency. It comes off as making the game longer in the cheapest way possible. Like beat-em-ups of yesteryear, Kung Fu Strike has a bare bones story that is told during loading screens. This would’ve been alright if the combat system had felt more polished. As it stands it feels like slightly more than a Batman: Arkham City clone. I can see points where Kung Fu Strike comes together like a coherent experience, but it’s not against the bosses like you’d expect. Only when I fought hordes of grunts could I feel like the powerful martial artist this game so desperately wanted me to be. Unfortunately these moments are few and far between.
The old schoold beat-em-ups will always hold a special place in my heart. So when I saw that Kung Fu Strike was taking most of it’s influence from these games, I was giddy with anticipation. If only it hadn’t taken the worst elements from those games like cheap, quarter munching deaths or too many enemies on-screen. I wanted to love Kung Fu Strike, but with each passing level I felt more and more of a bitter taste in my mouth. Every boss battle was supposed to feel fun and fresh. Instead each one became a battle of patience as they deflected attacks mid- combo, repeatedly used the same attack over and over, all while the frame rate slowed. I understand why someone could want a game that is intentionally “too hard”, but this felt more like an easy game that had to use a variety of gimmicks to become hard. Maybe with a little more time in development this game could’ve been a gem, but the way it is now it’s simply a case of a bun needing more time in the oven.
Kung Fu Strike The Warrior’s Rise is available September 5, 2012 for 800 MS points on the Xbox Live Arcade.