Kung Fury: Street Rage Ultimate Edition Review

Kung Fury: Street Rage Ultimate Edition is a beat’em up style game that acts as a spiritual sequel to a 2015 short film called Kung Fury. As with any game of the genre, your goal is to survive the endless waves of bad guys until you reach the end of each level. Although this Ultimate Edition feels features different “types” of beat’em ups in across three slightly different games.

This bundle includes Kung Fury: Street Rage, Kung Fury: The Arcade Strikes Back, and Kung Fury Street Rage: A Day At The Beach. While typically beat’em ups let players move around freely to wreck their aggressors, Street Rage and The Arcade Strikes Back only require you to hit attack buttons; you can’t move around freely. So to attack enemies coming from the left, you either press left on the d-pad or joystick, X or Y. And to attack enemies from the right, you use the right direction on the d-pad and joystick or, A or B.

Unlike more traditional beat’em ups, with those two games, you can’t just mash buttons willy-nilly to create combos. You have to time your attacks accordingly which will increase your bonus/combo. Interestingly enough, if you screw up, the bonus meter doesn’t start over. You lose 1 for each mistake. The higher you get your bonus meter, the more points you get.

Another difference is that Street Rage is Endless, meaning it’s like survival mode in other fighting games: survive as long as you can before dying. Whereas The Arcade Strikes Back retains the same semi-stationary combat but is more story driven. And A Day At The Beach is a typical beat’em up where you’re free to move around and beat up everyone. You can also use a special attack and use the B button to push enemies away. Unfortunately, you cannot jump to avoid enemies or do jump attacks.

All 3 games let you select from five different playable characters with their own unique skillset: Kung Fury, Hackerman, Barabarianna, Triceracop, and the one and only David Hasselhoff himself. Beating up enemies refills your Special attack meter (quite quickly might I add) so you can get yourself out of complex situations. You’ll also find crates to break which can contain hearts to refill your health. And you’re going to need it because it can get quite brutal, quite fast.

The game looks absolutely perfectly retro with its 8/16-bit pixelated visuals with a synthwave, 80s aesthetic. It also offers five distinctly designed levels: Back alley, Dreamworld, Viking Age, Sewers, and Beach; all of which are available across the three games inside the collection. And the soundtrack, as you’d expect, is an 80ish synth score that will give flashbacks to a simpler time. It’s not the type of soundtrack that will haunt your thoughts after a play session, but it’s decent to match the visual style.

While there’s nothing inherently wrong here, there’s a problem with the game’s overall difficulty and balance. While there’s no way to adjust the difficulty, at the core, it’s a very challenging game, especially Street Rage and The Arcade Strikes Back mostly because you can’t move, but it also seems to vary from character to character. While playing as the titular character, Triceracop or Barbarianna, the game felt unnecessarily difficult whereas with the Hoff, it felt more “fair”. Each game is a bit short too; personally, I believe a fairly balanced challenge across the board with more levels is more enjoyable than unbalanced difficulty and few levels.

Kung Fury: Street Rage Ultimate Edition is a great addition to the beat’em up genre. Having two types of gameplay (across three games) from the genre in the same collection is a neat idea as it gives fans of the genre a chance to try something new while having something familiar to fall back on if the semi-stationary gameplay doesn’t suit them. All three games feel unbalanced, but it doesn’t take away from the fun you can have. If you’re a fan of the beat’em up the style of games looking for something new to munch on, Kung Fury: Street Rage Ultimate Edition is a great choice.