Cobra Kai 2: Dojos Rising Review

Cobra Kai 2: Dojos Rising is a typical beat’em up whereas a team of 4 characters, you go through each level beating up everyone from All-Valley that seemingly want to stop you from winning a karate tournament. It’s the typical go here, beat up a set amount of enemies, and move on to the next area. The game is a sequel to Cobra Kai: The Karate Kid Saga Continues and is inspired by the popular Netflix show.

One interesting new mechanic is that you can recruit additional fighters. When reaching a specific area, you’ll have a pre-determined conversation where the NPC will ask for your help about something and when you successfully complete it, you’ll have the option to recruit that person. Each character has their own unique abilities; for example, Chris, given he’s a bigger kid, his “class” is tank. There are also specific requirements for recruitment; for example, to be able to recruit Nate, you must not have recruited (or let go) Robby, otherwise, even after beating Nate, he won’t join.

Each character can do light attacks, run, grab, parry and jump. You also have a Chi meter that fills up throughout battles thus allowing you to either smash enemies in a specific area of a level to dish out environmental damage to your enemy or use one of four special attacks. Each character has four special attacks which are triggered by holding down RT and pressing one of the four face buttons. In between levels, you can assign special attacks to each party member. You’re supposed to be able to throw enemies, but it never worked for me, even when looking at the options.

This brings me to the dojo. So in between each level, you can explore the dojo and upgrade it for additional perks, assign special attacks to your crew and use experience points to increase critical attack and health for example. XP is accumulated through each battle. There’s also recruitable staff that will help maintain the dojo and give buffs/perks to your crew such as the ability to equip weapons from the get-go. You also need to manage your crew’s mood. Once they reach a specific mood, they’ll benefit from perks in combat such as additional speed or increased chances of Critical attack.

Each battle sequences have special additional objectives that can be completed such as do not get hit or complete the battle under a specific time for example. On top of that, there’s a special Sensei Dare where a specific requirement must be respected in order to be successful. So, for example for a battle, you might be asked to not switch characters or don’t use grabs. They also added platforming for some reason, but the piss poor camera and slightly loose control make it more cumbersome than anything else.

Once you’ve gone through the 3 dojos in story mode or simply need a break, the developers added a few additional game modes. There’s Cobra Classics where you can play through loose representations of classic battles from the show such as the big brawl at the high school. All Valley Tournament is a mode where you can play against your friends. And Survival mode… well that’s pretty self-explanatory.

So the game’s main nuisance is the camera change. Whereas the previous game was more of a side-scrolling beat’em up, they switched things with a 3D isometric camera view, similar to what you’d see in Diablo games. It feels off and oftentimes, you won’t even see enemies coming from behind until it’s too late. It also spazzes out when in enclosed areas and a specific level I kept getting out of the bounds because I couldn’t where I was going and ended up going through a wall I couldn’t escape. In the famous words of the Angry Video Game Nerd: What were they thinking?

There was also a clear lack of QA here. Aside from the aforementioned out-of-bounds scenario where I had to quit and restart the level (which happened 3 freakin’ times before I shut it off), or when you try to grab an enemy or a weapon, the character spazzes out and has smoke(?!!) surrounding them. Also, sometimes a dropped weapon will also inexplicably float in mid-air. Other times your attack will also go through the enemy without doing any damage.

The game looks fine as a whole; don’t expect realistic capture of the show’s characters, however. Most of them couldn’t be more different than the real thing and it’s a bit disappointing, to be honest. The levels are unique and overall well-designed, but it’s kind of hard to tell at times because of the questionable and sometimes dizzying camera. The whole visual presentation is very colorful giving it a comic book-like feel.

The voiceover work is where the sh!t hits the proverbial fan. While a handful of characters such as Daniel Larusso, Hawk, and Dimitri do sound like their tv show counterparts, characters like Robby, Brucks, and Moon; among others sound absolutely nothing like their characters; and most of their performance sound phoned in. The guy voicing Robby sounds emotionless and bored as hell whereas Moon sounds either jaded or baked out of her skull. And the soundtrack sounds like the composers were trying to capture the feel of the show’s kickass sound from Leo Birenberg and Zach Robinson but failing miserably as it sounds very generic and forgettable.

I feel torn here because I like the first game for how simple it was while being unnecessarily hard, whereas the sequel improves on everything such as gameplay, content, character customization, and dojo management, but the new camera angle kills it for me. Always having to adjust it and having it spaz out in enclosed areas will prove frustrating. Cobra Kai 2: Dojos Rising improves on everything except the camera. Had it been a side-scrolling view, this would’ve skyrocketed to my top 5 of the year. This is still a great game, but it takes a bit of time to adjust to the janky camera. This game is easy to pick up & play, has a handful of game modes, and has three slightly different story paths. A lot of bang for your buck here; once you get adjusted to the camera, this is an addictive game.