Kung Fury: Street Rage Review

 A day or two ago I saw David Sandberg’s crowdsourced love project, Kung Fury. I adored it. But since GameSkinny is for video games, not movies: I bought the tie-in video game. They have a lot in common.

The controls are stupidly simple: left and right for attacks. That’s it. You just wait until an enemy gets within range, then press the direction he’s coming from. The standard enemies are just Nazi peons that die in one hit. The more interesting enemies take multiple hits and wrap around you as you hit them, requiring you to memorize their patterns and create sequences.

When the game throws about half a dozen at you at the same time, all with different sequences required to defeat them, that’s when things get hectic and challenging.

If this sounds at all familiar to any you, that’s because this game is pretty much a simplified rip-off of One Finger Death Punch. 

Imagine that game (if any of you played it) but without adjustable difficulty, levels, alternate game modes, or unlockable special moves. You just play on the same level until you drop.

But that’s not an entirely bad thing, and here’s why: much like the movie, this game is a short but sweet retro time-waster.

This is a game that you just open up on your phone to play while riding the bus. And unlike One Finger Death Punch, this game made an effort to look good. The pixel art is appropriately sylized to imitate the aesthetic of old arcade beat-em-ups like Streets of Rage or Double Dragon. It even adds a filter to make it look like an old convex arcade screen. Following in the spirit of the film, Kung Fury: Street Rage rides the ’80s nostalgia theme right into the ground. I appreciate that.

Unfortunately, they’re asking $2 for it. If you want to support the makers of Kung Fury go on and buy it, but it definitely isn’t worth $2. I’ve played better beat-em-ups on Addictinggames for nothing. I’d suggest waiting a while until they drop the price, because until then this game isn’t much more than an overpriced novelty.