KungFu Kickball Review

KungFu Kickball is a fighter/sport gaming combination where players need to score by kicking the ball into a giant bell. The one who scores the most is obviously the winner. I’m guessing kickball is played differently in different countries because that’s not how we played kickball when I was a kid. The Kung fu aspect of it comes into play during matches where your punches and kicks can also be used to temporarily put your opponent(s) out of commission for a brief half a second.

The player can punch, kick, jump, use a special move and a strong attack to knock the ball towards the goal or your opponent. You can also dash to catch up with the opposing player when he’s gaining distance on you. While the game doesn’t have a story mode, it does have a handful of modes: Arcade, Versus, Training, Custom Match (where you can create a tailor-made match by changing settings such as match time, gravity strength, game speed, etc…) and Tournament. You can play with friends locally or online.

The game looks great as a whole with its cartoony visuals. Characters, while a bit generic and having a déjà vu feeling, look unique and look different from one another. The variety of levels is decent and each environment, while not uber highly detailed, is unique and has its own theme and color theme. The soundtrack is surpringly and like the color theme, each level has its own unique song inspired by the level design.

The lack of a story campaign feels like a missed opportunity especially given how well it turned for Dodgeball Academia. The other, slightly more problematic, is the controls. The characters feel incredibly floaty and there seems to be a serious lack of gravity consideration. Additionally, once again, with so many buttons on a controller, and so little gameplay variety, why use a single button for each attack with a direction rather than each having its own button.

KungFu Kickball is a unique mix of two different genres and gameplay that somehow works. While the game is lacking a story campaign to keep players hooked, once you grasp the floaty and limited controls, this game is good for a bit of fun; solo or with friends; especially with 3 other players as things can get a bit hectic. It’s just unfortunate that the developers didn’t do anything efforts to pad this experience.