Once again I find myself reviewing a game I have been unable to complete, not because I thought the game was terrible and threw my controller down in disgust but because of the inherent design flaws which stopped me being able to progress past the second stage. The game in question today is Avatar Kung Fu by UFOGames, which is a side scrolling beat em up, think of it a little like Streets of Rage but with Avatars.
The gameplay is very basic you can only move left and right and punch or kick, you can also jump and duck punches. Your goal is to get to the end of the stages, beat the bosses and to eventually save your friend who is kidnapped at the start of the game.
[nggtags gallery=AvatarKungfu]
As soon as the stage starts you are told to go left, I went right and I walked right off the edge of the stage into the blackness of Cartesian space. I then walked back onto the stage and continued normally. I found that the animation for anything when your facing left is ‘paused’ such as when you walk left, your pose is mid-walk with no animation and if you are standing to the left idle you have no animation either.
There seems to be various flaws in the fighting system. You can take out any character with one punch except bosses or people who block. You can take out any blockers by ducking and punching them in the crotch, which results in an amusing falling over animation. However I must say that it appears that every single female in this game are transvestites as they also suffer the same fate with crotch shots. In contrast it takes several kicks to take out enemies. There is also an issue when jumping where if you you can change the direction it will continue jumping in the opposite direction of what you have pressed.
On the first level you only have people coming at you from the front or behind, once you take them out you get a boss which is a guy with a baseball bat. All you need to do is stand fairly close to him, wait till he swings and then jump or duck and kick him over and over. The second stage has some hazards like flame throwers that shoot out and saw blades that move across the floor, however it’s disappointing that these don’t hurt the enemies as well when they hit them. I was able to progress about a third of the way through the second stage when I was ganged up on by 6 or 7 opponents which made it impossible to progress. This was largely due to an issue being unable to hit someone who’s too close to you, I tried several times to progress and failed.
A lot of the animation is quite basic and some areas have very buggy animation. The intro is far too long especially if you die on stage 1 you have to watch it again. A big annoyance is you only get 3 lives and no continues, if you die, you start from the beginning of the stage. The lack of a block is also rather annoying as is the lack of being able to restore one’s health.
The background graphics aren’t too bad though after a while it’s like watching the background go past in a Flintstones cartoon as it has a tendency to keep repeating. Most of the 2D graphics aren’t too bad but there’s the odd thing that could be a little better. The music is extremely repetitive consisting of only very short loops and becomes quite tiresome quickly.
The only good thing I can think of with this game is that it’s a fighting game with avatars which is something I’ve wanted to see but sadly it has been poorly executed. Even though you are on a linear path, the enemies come out on 3 different layers and you turn automatically to battle them when you execute a move, but it would be better if you could move around the stage like most side scrollers.
At 240 :MSPoints: I’d give this one a miss, based on the amount of games UFOGames have released and the fact the majority seem to be avatar based it I get the impression that they just quickly push them out and don’t bother testing them or giving any thought towards gameplay. The number of bugs is overwhelming and many inherent design flaws as well as the lack of inspired slow paced gameplay stop this game from being any fun.
More information about Avatar Kung-fu! can be found on the Marketplace.
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