The Karate Kid: Street Rumble Review

The Karate Kid: Street Rumble is a loose gaming adaptation of the first three The Karate Kid movies. If you’ve watched the movies (who hasn’t by now), you’ll recognize certain themes and events from the cinematic endeavours such as Daniel Larusso being bullied by Johnny Lawrence, Sato being a general nuisance and Terry Silver’s twisted mind games on our hero.

The Karate Kid: Street Rumble is a 2D 16-bit pixelated beat’em up akin to the Final Fight and Street of Rage series mixed with a bit of RPG mechanics. Go from left to right by beating up everyone in your way in order to progress through each level and reach the end level boss. As with other games in the genre, you can pick up health items and power ups.

You can choose from four playable characters: Daniel Larusso, Mr. Miyagi, Kumiko and Ali. Each of them has a weak attack, strong attack and signature move. Our heroes can also run and dodge attacks. Protagonists can also do jump attacks, both weak and strong. Each character has their own unique signature that can be used when the meter is full. You’ll hear a slight ding when it’s ready to go.

Each level has a trio of objectives to complete such as defeat X number of enemies with signature moves, aerial attacks; or do not get hit during the level. Completing levels and their objectives rewards players with XP which levels up the character to unlock more health, Signature move meter bars and new attacks and combos. This gives the game a little of depths in terms of combat.

While some levels are basic go from start to finish, there are bonus stage like levels where you’ll compete with an A.I. to score the highest score in different activities such as the Drum techniques, capturing flies, punching a wooden statue (like in The Karate Kid part III), pull off the combos on screen.

The game offer some replay variety. You can either try to reach the highest score with each character for all levels, you can play with up to 3 friends in co-op mode. You can also unlock additional game modes: Minigames, Boss Rush, Endless and Arcade.

The game looks great in all of its pixelated glory; The Karate Kid: Street Rumble feels like it’s straight out of the Super NES era. Characters are overall well-detailed; there’s a decent amount of variety in terms of enemy design. Each level represents various areas of the Daniel Larusso trilogy. The soundtrack is a monotone and generic affair. While Sony gave them the movie licensing, they could’ve figured out a way to get the music licensing too. Who doesn’t want to hear Joe Esposito’s You’re The Best in chiptune style?

It’s incredibly annoying that your signature move meter is depleted every time you get it. While I get it can be a “git gud” type of mentality, however the signature move could come in handy when you’re getting bounced around by 10-12 enemies at once. The game’s balancing could been refined. While the first few levels, everything, including boss battles, are pretty fair, once you reach the Tournament level, the Johnny Lawrence boss fight dials the difficulty up to 11 out of nowhere. Also feels like characters are wearing cement boots.

The Karate Kid: Street Rumble is actually a decent and fun gaming experience. Easy to pick up and play, but hard to master thanks to its surprisingly deep combat system, RPG like mechanics and replay value. While character movement can feel a bit slow and the crazy difficulty spike 1/4 of the way in, it’ll easily fill your beat’em up void. But given its steep price tag for something that can be finished in about a 2 hour single sitting, might wanna wait for a sale.