Review: Kung Fury: Street Rage

Posted by Curtis H on August 13th, 2015 | 0 Comments | Tags: Kung Fury: Street Rage

The short film Kung Fury is a homage to 80’s martial arts/police films with plenty of over-the-top action. It’s available for free on YouTube and totally worth a watch.

Kung Fury: Street Rage takes some characters from the movie and puts them in a very simple tie-in game that’s surprisingly fun. As Kung Fury you’re positioned in a stage that feels like it was lifted straight out of an old school brawler. Left and Right on the d-pad allows you to attack in either direction and serve as your only control. (Most buttons on the controller work as left/right. I prefer using L1 and R1.) As enemies appear from either side of the screen you’ll need to attack in their direction once their within range. Some enemies go down in one hit, some take 2-4 hits, others require a left-right-left combo, etc. As long as you can continuously take out enemies without missing or getting hit a combo will build leading to higher scores. Taking a hit drops the combo significantly and three hits ends the run. With each run lasting just a couple minutes the game can be pretty hard to put down. It’s very easy to fall into that “one more run” mentality. Part of that’s also because it feels like a rhythm game. It’s easy to just get into a groove while you’re building a combo and watching Kung Fury pull off flashy counterattacks.

Much like the movie Kung Fury: Street Rage has a lot of style going for it. The game features nice pixel-art with some filters to simulate the screen of an arcade cabinet, the pause menu is a BSOD, and the attack animations are appropriately over-the-top. I do wish the game had more background areas to fight in though. The movie has a lot of weird locations that would be perfect to have as background arenas in the game, but unfortunately Kung Fury: Street Rage features just one.

Kung Fury is a lot of fun and it’s been a game that I’ve been excited to play during any downtime over the past couple days. I haven’t quite hit the top of the built-in leaderboards, but there’s always room for improvement. Strategizing about which enemies would be best to take out first provides a surprising amount of depth. That said it’s really disappointing that the game does not feature online leaderboards of any kind. For as fun as the game is I think it’s really missing a lot without one.

A copy of this game was purchased for review purposes. For more info on our review policy click here.