As a fan of the beat ’em up genre, I am not difficult to please. Give me a fully functional game with some cool looking fighters, some faces to pummel with varied attacks, and allow me to bring a friend or two along, and I am good for a couple of hours of fun. Overall, Cobra Kai: The Karate Kid Saga Continues checks off most of these boxes, but it fails in some of the more important aspects that made this style of game popular in the first place.
For the uninformed, the game follows the rivalry between the Cobra Kai and Miyagi dojos that originated from The Karate Kid fame. It allows you to select either side of the story, requiring you to complete the narrative on both sides within the same save file to see the “true” ending. Outside of casually viewing the original films, I can’t speak to how true this story is to the franchise, but it does inject enough semi-cringe-level cheese that I wouldn’t be shocked to learn it’s a play by play reenactment of the recent spin-off now on Netflix. Regardless of which faction you start with, the experience remains largely the same outside of the team of four you control, starting off small and allowing you to learn the ropes as a single fighter, adding additional options as the narrative unfolds over the very long story that spans upwards of thirty levels per dojo. At this point, you probably assume that I loved this game, which at times I did, but overall this was a bit of a chore to complete to the extent that I did. This is definitely a case of quantity over quality – it’s not one specific thing that made me indifferent towards this game, it’s a culmination of little annoyances that grow like a bad case of teenage acne.
As of this writing, I’ve tried to complete the final level of the Cobra Kai end three times, which took me around eight hours to reach, making this one of the longest brawlers I have ever played. The final level is a challenge, much as you’d expect, and like every great beat ’em up, asks you to beat every boss and sub-boss you’ve already faced at least once, if not more. On every attempt thus far, the game has crashed when Daniel (who I am pretty damn sure is the last boss) calls in one last massive wave of supporting low-level enemies that the game just can’t keep up with. If this was ten or fifteen minutes of my time, I would be annoyed, but try to push through to the credits… but there’s close to 30 levels here, which house a lot of big baddies that you’ll have to beat a few more times each, sometimes in groups, that drag this final level out to around 45 minutes or so, with no mid-level save points.
Up through the final challenge, I rode a wave of enjoyment, frustration, and boredom that changed at a borderline bi-polar pace. Initially, I enjoyed the basic combat that tasked me with using punches, kicks, dodges, parries, grabs, and jump attacks to pummel the original cast of enemies that never really evolved until the static difficulty ramped up. At this point, I was forced to investigate the expansive upgrade trees, and my experience ebbed and flowed in this pattern until my group of combatants was maxed out across the board. By the time you unlock everything under either dojo, you’ll be able to not only use the vanilla tactics, but hold down either trigger with any additional face button to bust out either a character or dojo specific special ability, or unleash an overpowered super ability by holding both triggers. Once everything is unlocked, it becomes laughable as you can essentially chain these attacks together in rapid succession, mop up stragglers, and repeat your way to the boss with little opposition. However, the trek between was rough for me, as you cannot map the attacks to your preferred buttons and left me just mashing random buttons when holding triggers, usually as I was getting pelted by annoying attack after annoying attack. At its best, Cobra Kai: The Karate Kid Saga Continues is a decent brawler that I found myself engaged with for hours, but there were just enough points where I felt overwhelmed due to the sheer number of combat options, bugs, and special mechanics, and the bad unfortunately outweighs the good.
No matter what point of the game you’re in, there are a few things that just don’t work as they should, at least not consistently. There are environmental attacks, aptly named Badass Attacks, which allow you to grab one of the nearest enemies and slam them into a porta john, hotdog cart, table, or other in-game assets. The problem here is as the game gets tougher, certain enemies ignore the attack altogether, and I’m not talking about just single classes – specific one-off enemies ignored this feature. Adding to the list of broken bits and pieces is the parry ability, which can be used when the enemies flash red… sometimes… I say sometimes because first off, both the window of time when the enemy turns red and when your avatar stick in this standoff of sorts is ridiculous, usually leaving you with a foot to the face and your character just sitting there waiting for it. It’s a situation where they have to turn red, you take a couple of breaths and then counter if it applies to the attack, because again, some of them don’t seem to be able to be parried, despite the game telling you they can. The good news is that once you find a balance with the upgrades (because that is the only balance the game really has), you’ll only struggle when you get caught with a one-off attack that gets followed up with a few more cheap shots before you can recover and catch your bearings.
When the game functions as it should, it is an often enjoyable romp through the beat em’ up tropes that we all know and love, just with a surprising number of speed bumps. You’ll traverse through all the typical locales, fight some parodies of American culture (I really loved punching a Karen in the face), acquire the token food pickups, and use the occasional weapon drop. It’s rather mindless but becomes much more enjoyable when you bring in a second player in drop-in/drop-out co-op that is limited to local play as of this time. The ability to tag in or out all of the members of your faction at the flick of the D-pad felt intuitive and worked as it should, allowing my son (my dedicated player two who is not as seasoned in the brawler world as I am) to stay in the game longer than normal.
The overall presentation is a mixed bag of fan service (including Ralph Macchio and other stars from the show reprising their role) and the normal licensed game pitfalls you’d expect. Visually, the game came across as a reskin of the Sega Saturn-era Die Hard Arcade thanks to the stiff character models that often looked like they were missing a few frames of animation. A fair amount of bugs are present as well; situations where the enemies would get hung up on what appeared to be nothing, or teleport across the field of view with no explanation, were common. I wouldn’t say that the cel-shaded visuals are terrible, they just look extremely dated, like this could have run on the past generation or two of consoles with minimal issues, outside of the obvious problem I encountered on the final battle.
Cobra Kai: The Karate Kid Saga Continues isn’t going to be the best brawler you’ve ever played, but it’s a passable entry into a genre that doesn’t get the attention it should, likely due to the lack of successful innovations. It checked off my shortlist of needs and there are definitely worse options out there, but I would only recommend this if you’re really into the source material or find it on a deep discount.
5 out of 10
Pros
- Punching Karen in the Face
- Checks Off All Genre Tropes
- Eight Playable Characters
- Engaging Combat When Everything Works
- A Wealth of Content…
Cons
- …That Falls Under “Less is More”
- Tons of Glitches
- No Online Play
- Some Broken Mechanics
- Looks Dated
Cobra Kai: The Karate Kid Saga Continues was developed by Flux and published by GameMill Entertainment. It is available on NS, PC, PS4, and X1. The game was provided to us for review on PS4. If you’d like to see more of Cobra Kai: The Karate Kid Saga Continues, check out the official site.
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