Kickbeat Review

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Reviewed on PC
→ January 23, 2014After debuting on the PS Vita months ago, Zen Studios’ kung fu-themed rhythm fighter KickBeat has finally landed on Steam. The discrete, one-song-at-a-time setup arguably makes a lot more sense on Sony’s portable system, but the crisp, colorful visuals pop more than ever on a larger monitor. The rest of the game’s core elements remain largely intact, which means the flashy fighting visuals still aren’t quite enough to compensate for the limited content and demanding yet basic gameplay.
In short, KickBeat challenges players to beat up bad guys in time with a handful of songs. Each level tosses you into a circular arena where various thugs from nightclub bouncers to Turkish wrestlers attack from one of four angles, each of which corresponds with the WASD keys. Your job is to consistently tap the appropriate button at exactly the right moment in order to counter each incoming attack. This combat-oriented premise is certainly novel, but claiming KickBeat combines rhythm and fighting games is slightly misleading.
Your rhythmic inputs don’t actually control what your on-screen avatar does, they simply determine whether or not he succeeds. In other words, you’re not selecting specific attacks as you would in a true fighting game; rather, your avatar acts automatically in response to how well you follow the rhythmic button prompts. Despite the slightly choppy butt-kicking happening on screen, the mechanics ultimately adhere to the baseline button-matching gameplay we’ve seen in rhythm games for well over a decade. It’s a little disappointing that Zen Studios couldn’t find a slightly more creative or meaningful way to combine the two genres.
KickBeat still works well as a straight-up rhythm experience, though. Thanks to some small but intelligent nuances, the gameplay demands intense focus and near-instant pattern recognition. For example, you may have to press two buttons at once to deal with simultaneous attackers, hold and release a button to deal with special linked opponents, or double-tap a button in order to earn the power-up hovering above a particular enemy’s head. Sure, these variations sound simple, but dealing with all of them in the moment, your fingers (and brain) can totally betray you. It’s a clever way of achieving the underlying tension that forms the bedrock of the entire genre.
Heels incoming!

Where KickBeat really starts to run into trouble though, is content. The soundtrack is a meager 26 songs long and features such fresh, relevant acts as Rob Zombie, P.O.D., and Papa Roach. The songlist has actually grown since the Vita version, but the eight additional tracks all come from the same artist. If you’re a huge enV fan you’ll be thrilled, but the songs all sound similar enough that they fail to add any real variety. The lesser-known material is mostly sterile electronic rap-rock that somehow escaped from a late-‘90s Mountain Dew commercial. It’s bleak.
You can also import your own music, but while the system is accessible much earlier in the game than it was in the Vita version, the process is still imperfect at best. Rather than detect each song’s tempo automatically, you have to tap the spacebar in time with the music in order to set the beats per minute. I tried this with a few electronic songs, and while my innate rhythm is pretty strong, it’s nowhere near as robotically perfect as a drum machine’s. As a result, getting the gameplay to match the music takes a great deal of fiddling, if you can pull it off at all. And even once you succeed, enemy attack patterns rarely correlate with what’s happening in the song. The process is slightly more convenient on PC than it was on the Vita, but the results aren’t noticeably better.
Flashing lights.

Meanwhile, the storyline is full of enough winking, tongue-in-cheek humor to provide some relief, but the narrative package as a whole is ultimately pretty generic and forgettable. And despite the two complementary storylines, the main campaign is exactly the same regardless of which one you pick (aside from the cutscenes, naturally), which means the only way to add variety is to up the difficulty. This does change enemies’ patterns, but aside from giving you more buttons to press, it doesn’t alter or expand on the underlying formula. It’s still decently fun, but without a stronger gameplay hook, the same old button-matching grows tired even as it gets tougher.
Players looking to prove themselves by overcoming a genuinely punishing experience need look no further than KickBeat’s Master mode, though. For some players, challenge is its own reward. For the rest of us, the PC version of KickBeat introduces on-screen, color-coded visual cues that can be toggled on and off. Previously this kind of assistance was available exclusively in Normal mode, so while the color system is somewhat clumsy and confusing (mainly because it overlaps with enemies’ color-coding), it does help balance out the learning curve.



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