The Karate Kid: Street Rumble review: Wax Off

Reviewing a licensed video game often feels like flipping open Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, but instead of its classic opening line, you get this: “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a decently popular franchise, must be in want of a mediocre tie-in game.” Funnily enough, I was lamenting the lack of good licensed video games before playing Karate Kid: Street Rumble. They were rare, but they weren’t non-existent. Surely we could do better now. After playing Karate Kid: Street Rumble, I remember that a lot of them were mediocre cash-ins. Sometimes, it's better to let sleeping dogs lie.

Karate Kid: Street Rumble is an old-school beat ‘em up that borrows the general aesthetic and story from The Karate Kid. That’s really all you need to know about Street Rumble. I’ll be honest; I don’t know why Street Rumble exists. It feels like developer Odaclick Game Studio wanted to make a beat ‘em up and could only get the funding for it by attaching it to a franchise from the ‘80s. The problem is that The Karate Kid is 40 years old. Most of the people who worked on the original film are either old enough to be AARP members or dead. Yeah, Cobra Kai’s done a good job of bringing the franchise back into the spotlight, but unfortunately Street Rumble doesn’t do the story of the original films justice.

You Too Much TV

Let’s get the basics out of the way: Karate Kid: Street Rumble is a fairly standard beat ‘em up. You have light attacks and heavy attacks that you can chain together to perform combos, the ability to jump and perform jump attacks, and a spot dodge that will get you out of harm’s way if you time it right, but will leave you open if you time it wrong. What makes Street Rumble unique is the Focus Meter, which serves as something of a shield, absorbing damage if you have Focus to spare. You can also use bars of Focus to perform special attacks like Daniel LaRusso’s Crane Kick. There’s a nice push-and-pull between spending your Focus on special attacks and keeping some in reserve to help you tank hits. It’s a good idea. Unfortunately, it can’t save Street Rumble from its major problems.

Street Rumble recounts the story of several entries in the Karate Kid franchise. The problem is that it’s bad at it. Mostly, you get story moments in pre- and post-level dialogue exchanges and cutscenes. The issue here is that the cutscenes, which are essentially still images with written dialogue placed over them, look like they were drawn in Microsoft Paint, which is odd because the pixel art and backgrounds in the game are gorgeous. They also do a terrible job of recounting what’s actually going on. Mr. Miyagi doesn’t appear in one of the cutscenes until the end of Street Rumble’s rendition of the story of the original film. It’s not like he’s an important part of the series or anything! And it gets weirder from there! 

When you run into Chozen, nephew of Sato Toguchi, Miyagi’s former best friend turned rival, he takes you to see his uncle. The next time you see him, he demands to fight Daniel to the death. I’ll be real with you; it’s been several years since I saw The Karate Kid Part II, but I think it might be nice to know what the hell is going on here. I understand recounting the entire story isn’t what Street Rumble is here to do, but it would be nice if Odaclick Game Studio had included the basic story beats.

Sweep the Leg

Some of these are, in fairness, presented (without context) as minigames where Daniel has to master the Crane Kick or catch a fly with chopsticks. These are, at least, fun, but again, the lack of context is jarring, as is the lack of the portrayal of Daniel’s relationship with Miyagi. 

Your choice of playable characters is similarly bizarre. Daniel and Miyagi make sense, but why is Ali here? Or Kumiko? Neither of these characters are exactly series mainstays, and they’re not really known for fighting in the films. It’s also bizarre to see major moments in the films, which are one-on-one fights, like the tournament that serves as the first film’s climax, turned into encounters against a ton of mooks. And because you can pick whoever you want, it’s also very, very strange to see Johnny Lawrence come on-screen, taunt Daniel and Ali, who pop in for a quick dialogue exchange, and then watch them leave so you can beat up a bunch of people as Mr. Miyagi. Which brings me to a larger point: The Karate Kid, a series about the importance of not fighting until and unless you absolutely have to, and fighting honorably when you do have to, is a poor backdrop for a beat ‘em up. Beating up what feels like the entire population of Daniel’s high school feels wrong. It just doesn’t fit the spirit of the films.

I think I could overlook absolutely all of that if Street Rumble played well. It doesn’t. It’s fine, but “fine” doesn’t cut it in a genre where Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge and Streets of Rage 4 exist. At best, Street Rumble feels like half a beat ‘’em up because all you do is fight. There’s no fun gimmick levels besides the minigames, and there’s almost no environmental hazards to dodge, something that’s been a staple of the genre since it was in diapers. “But Will," you might say, "it doesn’t make sense for those things to be in a Karate Kid beat ‘em up!” Normally, I’d agree, but it also doesn’t make sense to largely ignore Miyagi’s relationship with Daniel when telling this story or have Daniel Miyagi, Ali, and Kumiko beating up hundreds of dudes for kicks, which is mostly what Street Rumble is. You walk into a room, beat up regular mooks, fast mooks, big mooks, and mooks with weapons, occasionally break a barrier that keeps you from progressing, and walk into a new room and do it all again. Beat up enough mooks, and you get to fight a boss. It gets very monotonous very quickly.

Wax On, Wax Off

And then there are the gameplay issues. Combos are pretty canned, so you’ll be doing a lot of the same stuff over and over. Yeah, there’s the ability to juggle fools who line up to get crane kicked, but there are only so many ways to launch dudes, so you’ll stick to what you know works. Of course, you can’t launch the heavy mooks or bosses, so half your combos become worthless, and the game is a lot less fun when they’re on-screen. The real issue, though, isn’t what happens to you when you’re waxing on, waxing off some dude’s face; it’s what happens when you get hit. Getting knocked down in Street Rumble is really, really bad, because enemies will surround you and hit you as soon as you get up, which… you guessed it, knocks you down again. There are ways to avoid this — moving up or down as soon as you get up seems to work… most of the time, anyway — but being stuck in this loop feels really bad, and getting out of it often comes down to luck.

What’s worse, though, is that getting hit when you don’t have any Focus meter means you’re going to take an absolutely ridiculous amount of damage. And God help you if you get launched yourself, and then a heavy mook manages to land a combo on you when you’re in the air. In that case, you’ll probably just die. It’s very easy to die in a single exchange in Street Rumble, and it never feels good when it happens. If you’re playing in local co-op (there is, bafflingly, no online co-op in Street Rumble), you can pick your buddies up when they go down, but that means standing still for a while and opening yourself up to hits. At least that has some risk to it, and you get a nice reward if you pull it off. But if you’re playing solo, you’re out of luck.

And then there are the baffling design decisions. Say a level is giving you trouble by yourself, so you turn the difficulty down to clear it. Later on, you might want to play a later level on a higher difficulty with friends. Makes sense, right? Well, you can’t unless you clear every previous level on that higher difficulty. That sucks. Characters level up as you use them, which is fine, but it also encourages you to stick with them so you can level them up. If you’re swapping around a lot, your characters are going to be underleveled because each one levels separately, and levels will be harder than they should be. Get ready to grind if you wanna play the higher difficulties.

Strike First. Strike Hard. No Mercy

Oh, and Street Rumble is buggy, too. Sometimes, Achievements didn’t pop correctly when I cleared levels, or I got stuck on a combination of the camera and the level geometry and couldn’t progress. There was no way to fix this besides restarting the level. I mostly play beat ‘em ups with my wife; we know the genre well, and play (and replay) several of them in any given year. About half an hour into Street Rumble, she turned to me, made a face, and said “I don’t think I like this game.” I didn't, either.

Street Rumble isn’t terrible, but it’s not good either. Sure, it looks good, but the music is boring, the gameplay is bog standard, it has serious design flaws, and in a lot of cases, it just isn’t interesting. Yeah, there’s an arcade mode, boss rush, and so on, but you need to beat the story mode to unlock them, and if I hadn’t been playing this for review, I would have stopped around thirty minutes in. Beat ‘em up fans deserve better. Licensed games deserve better. And The Karate Kid deserves better than to be resurrected as a coat of paint used to gussy up a mediocre beat ‘em up.

Will Borger

Contributing Editor

Will Borger is a Pushcart Prize-nominated fiction writer and essayist who has been covering games since 2013. His fiction and essays have appeared in YourTango, Veteran Life, Marathon Literary Review, Purple Wall Stories, and Abergavenny Small Press. His games writing has also appeared at IGN, TechRadar, Into the Spine, Lifebar, PCGamesN, The Loadout, and elsewhere. He lives in New York with his wife and dreams of owning a dog. You can find him on X @bywillborger.