Kung Fury: Street Rage

Do you know what the best thing about Streets of Rage is? No, it isn't the two-player action, the kickass music or going head-to-head with an alien. I mean, that stuff is great, but the single best thing about Streets of Rage is the "streets." Plural. This old school beat-em-up didn't just take place in the back alley, but the fight spilled over onto a bridge, to the beach, on a boat and into a factory. It had diverse levels that didn't technically qualify as a "street." Without that variety, Streets of Rage would have been a lot like Kung Fury: Street Rage. And that's not a good thing.

So I know what you're thinking: Didn't this game come out a couple years ago? The simple answer is yes, it did. Kung Fury: Street Rage first debuted on mobile phones and computers in May of 2015 to coincide with the release of the purposely cheesy action film. A few months later it got a console release on the PlayStation 4, where it retailed for a paltry $2. Flash forward a couple years and it finally got a port to the PS Vita, where it should have been this entire time. Now that it is looking for a brand new market, I finally have a chance to loop back around and see if this budget brawler is worth your time.

If you're hoping that this game will expand on the nonsensical lore of Kung Fury, then prepare for disappointment. This is a dumb beat-em-up where enemies come at you from left and right and you press one of two buttons to beat them up. You don't even get to move around or pick up items, because all you're doing is pressing the button when an enemy is either to your left or right. It's basically a rhythm game with gang members.

To make things slightly more complicated, you'll have to deal with the various enemies in different ways. Some guys you'll only have to hit once or twice, but there are robots that require a hail of punches and a woman that will jump around on all sides of you. The goal in the story mode is to survive several waves of these gang members and then smack around an old arcade machine boss. Like I said, it's pretty dumb.

What I like about the game is that it lets you control a bunch of the characters from the movie. There's a female barbarian that packs and axe and some serious fire power, as well as a dinosaur cop using his police training to bust some crime. What's cool is that all of these characters has a quirk to their gameplay. For example, the robot will have to charge up his laser guns to take down enemies, something that really changes the rhythm of each fight.

The problem is that almost every part of this game feels repetitive after only a few minutes. The supporting cast and enemies may be varied, but the backgrounds and objectives certainly aren't. You do the same thing in the same looking background in every single level. The game does eventually get weird in a meta way towards the end, but by that time I was already bored by the two-button controls. I can see this being a good time when you're on a bus or just have a few minutes to do some brawling, but this is definitely not the game you will want to binge.

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In some ways, this brand new PS Vita port is both better and worse than the PlayStation 4 version. The visuals look slightly more old school on the Vita's smaller screen, especially compared to playing it on a big TV or computer monitor. I hesitate to call the other versions "high-definition," but there's a gloss to them that isn't on the Vita build. It looks slightly more authentic on the handheld. It's also surprisingly easier. Not sure if they tweaked the difficulty or it was my imagination, but I sped through levels I struggled with on the PS4.

Unfortunately, the performance takes a bit of a hit every time one of our fighters goes head to head with the boss. I'm not sure if it's the hardware having problem keeping up or something is wrong with the code, but these battles slow way down and drop a bunch of frames of animation. This is the only time the game hitches up like that, which makes me hope it's something they can fix with a patch. Then again, it took them two years to port the game to the Vita, so I'm not holding my breath for updates.

No matter what format you go with, chances are you'll get two dollars' worth of fun out of Kung Fury: Street Rage. I was annoyed by the repetition, simple gameplay and some technical issues on the PS Vita, but it's fun in short doses and I like the 1980s aesthetic. This game is right down the middle for me. It's neither a must-have nor a game to avoid. Kung Fury: Street Rage is just a simple little button tapper that doesn't cost much money. And maybe that's not a bad thing.