REVIEW - The Karate Kid: Street Rumble’s shortcomings hinder the entertainment

As a huge fan of the Karate Kid franchise, I was looking forward to experiencing Street Rumble. Sadly, this beat-em up based on the first three movies from the 80s feels incomplete, most likely due to budget reasons, as the work from the developing team was mostly good but very limited.

As the game is based on the original trilogy, it follows the same structure: we meet Daniel LaRusso as he aims to win a karate tournament, then we travel to Japan to visit Mr. Miyagi’s hometown, and finally we return to California. This synopsis of the trilogy is almost as short as the game. I was able to beat it in about three hours, and although you could go back to play as different characters, or to unlock all challenges in a given level, there is very little motivation to do so as the game is lacking as both a beat-em up and as a representation of the trilogy.

In terms of gameplay, you choose from four characters to go through levels, beating up baddies by using a combination of weak and strong attacks, and your signature moves. Every level gives you three challenges, such as beating up 10 enemies with strong attacks or not taking health damage. As you increase the number of hits you dole out without taking damage, you fill up your Focus bar. This bar has multiple segments, and they can be used in two ways: either to use a signature move or to not receive damage after a hit.

Smart use of the Focus bar is my highlight of the game. Sometimes you want to be defensive and avoid damage, since losing all of your health bar makes you lose one of your finite number of lives per level, but at other moments you just want to clear out a bunch of enemies, so using your signature move will help you out greatly.

You also have the opportunity to dodge, but not counting bosses, I rarely used it. Most levels were simply about hitting and hitting enemies, over and over again, with the occasional tactical retreat if too many baddies were too close. The best beat-em ups spice things up with different weapons, use of the environment, or great enemy variety; unfortunately, Street Rumble doesn’t provide a rich arsenal of anything, which supports my theory that the developing team had good intentions but weren’t given enough time or money to fully realize their ideas.

These limitations even extend to the story. While there are nine levels dedicated to the first movie, there are only six for the third movie and a meager three for the second entry. To add salt to the wound, one third of them are simple minigames. Telling a story with so little time is very hard, so the game omits so many key moments, resulting in a story that will likely not satisfy anyone.

If you are a fan of the franchise, like me, you notice right away the incompleteness and the lack of accuracy in some events. If you don’t follow the series, you really won’t understand what is going on and how you jumped from one event to another, or who this new character is that was never introduced but that seems familiar to everyone.

Interestingly, the game also has light RPG elements. You gain experience from beating levels, which translates to obtaining more lives and Focus bar segments, as well as character improvements in general, but these upgrades didn’t motivate me enough to tackle levels more than once – mostly because there is one way to attack that I didn’t mention before because I wanted to focus on the positive part of the battle system. But now let’s talk about grabbing enemies.

If you get close to an enemy without pressing any button, you will grab them. Then you can keep attacking the enemy as he is defenseless… but so are you. So, if you have many attackers on the screen, and you want to perform combos and run away, but you happen to not attack for a second, you will grab a baddie and then the rest will pile up on you. It is a terrible mechanic. A dedicated grab button would solve the problem, but so many times I got attacked just because I was moving around and an enemy got in the way.

Another issue were the boss fights. Most were quite simple, but a couple felt unbalanced, as you had to be generous with your dodging and could only cause little damage while they hit very hard if you were not careful. Even in the lowest difficulty setting they were annoying.

It got even worse when I lost twice in those battles and then in my third try – when I decided to test the multiplayer option that allows up to four players to tackle a level together – the game broke right before the boss fight. I had to do one full level four times just to beat a cheap boss with tons of health, tons of strength, and little room for error.

Other than that, one time an enemy clipped into the background and in another occasion, when replaying a level, enemies never appeared after the initial baddie at a certain point, so I had nothing to do but keep advancing without any fighting and only collecting the occasional item to replenish health or Focus bar segments.

Little enemy variety, basic music, and the fact that still cutscenes were more frequent at first than towards the end cemented my hunch that the team had good goals but were not provided with enough resources, which is a shame since this is a great franchise to have a beat-em up game – and titles like the first Cobra Kai game on Switch prove that you can make a good Karate Kid game!

The Karate Kid: Street Rumble had potential to be great, but due to its limitations, it is hard to recommend to fans of either the franchise or the beat-em up genre. If you’re curious, you will still find an ok game with nice pixel art that you can play for about four hours. Hopefully the team can have more resources in the future so they can produce a more complete game that translates all of their hard work into a great product.