The Karate Kid: Street Rumble (Switch)

Based on the Classic movie franchise, The Karate Kid: Street Rumble sees us retrace Daniel LaRusso and Mr. Miyagi (and a few others) famous steps from the original Karate Kid movie trilogy. GameMill are on publishing duties on this one giving Argentinian devs Odaclick Game Studio their first major credit. How do they fare with this classic movie franchise, let’s wax on over.

The Karate Kid movies see Daniel LaRusso a kid who moves to a new town and gets bullied by some kids who’s mastered the martial art karate. He decides he wants to learn it and gets the help of one Mr Miyagi, the original trilogy see Daniel go from strength to strength, however in this game any thing after this is ignored. Anyway Street Rumble re-enacts these 3 films in pixel beat ’em up form, where you go through level to level fighting enemies and more than likely you’ll fight a boss at the end of these levels.

First impressions of Street Rumble are good, pixel art looks nice, character models have a good look to them, and you can tell who everyone is. Even the villains of the series have a good look to them, and apart from the typical beat ’em up fare of every lower end baddie looking the same, everything looks the part. Each movie/location you go to things differ slightly, so there might be a colour swap or enemies given a different piece of clothing so there’s variety there, not every normal enemy is a Cobra Kai good per se.

Daniel, Mr Miyagi, Ali Mills (Female lead in og karate kid), and Kumiko from Karate Kid 2 are your 4 playable characters, though I do think you have to play as Daniel in certain levels, Julie Pierce doesn’t make the cut from the next karate kid nor does any of the villains from the original movie neither does Jackie Chan from the remake unfortunately.

The levels also look really nice, there’s a lot going on them depth wise, so your arcades will have people about them, locations are busy with normal people on the side, however the actual playing “field” does lack, there’s not a great deal of interactivity here, often beat ’em ups will have some forms of obstacles to get around, or there’ll be scenery to interact with to do additional damage, but Street Rumble lacks this and it’s a shame as this could have given the combat some extra depth.

Speaking on the combat, things are ok here. Each character has a basic move set, with everyone playing ever so slightly different. Everyone has heavy and light attacks which can be put into a combo, there’s grabs and everyone has a unique special attack, and there’s a dodge button too which will help keep your combo meter up and obviously stop you from taking damage, the combo meter fills up for your special attack which can be triggered with the R button on the control. That’s pretty much it. As mentioned combat areas don’t have any interactivity, and there’s no weapons to give a bit of additional depth to combat which is a shame. The movies don’t tend to have weapons however 99% of games in the genre do, so I think some could have been added.

One thing to take away from this, is the inclusion of 4 player co-op, couch co-op is always good in these for some fun brawling action, and the games good enough to include 4 players here, there’s also a plethora of mini games between some of the levels and these can be played in a second menu once unlocked in the main game. There’s nothing majorly note worthy, most of these will include button bashing, or matching screen prompts but it’s something. Timing crane kicks was pretty good though.

Audio isn’t too bad, there’s music for every level, and including cut scenes too, these are all upbeat and inkeeping with the movie. The big omission here is the lack of Joe Esposito’s You’re The Best Around, which would have been huge for the final level based around the first movie, not even a pixel track cover. There’s no voice acting here either, even in levels or in between levels in the cut scenes. It’s a big shame as a movie license should be hitting them easy wins with stuff like this.

Street Rumble doesn’t feel rushed, but it could have done with a bit of extra time in the oven, a fair few fighting games with similar aesthetics knock this out of the ring, and the new Power Rangers only months away people will probably skip this or give it a go if it’s cheap. It almost feels like a quick mobile tie in.