Silverain Plays: Karate Survivor: Ep5: A Final Attempt [End]
1Developed and published by Alawar, Karate Survivor is a roguelike auto battler inspired by 80s action movies where we fight off waves of thugs for between 15-20 minutes until the area boss turns up by chaining together strings of martial art moves. Whilst the concept is excellent and the animations and music give a great visual style to the game the overall mechanics fall very flat.
The main mechanic is that you strike in melee and chain all your unlocked moves creating a combo, where various punches and kicks follow one another in succession, creating a combo. Unlike many other games in the genre, where you are basically shooting in all directions non-stop, in this game your strikes are directional apart from a few rare instances. Thus requiring you time your attacks. This creates a back-and-forth movement, which makes gameplay more involved. Great in theory but in practice it doesn’t work well. Especially as the forces you to chain moves both by style type and sequentially to be most effective which basically forces the player to used established combos over and over again.
The players hitbox is very poorly mapped resulting in taking hits or interacting with various objects which can cause you to fail your run at higher difficulties as the enviromental attacks and item damage are poorly scaled and become a hinderance rather than a boon. This negates one of the games main selling points.
This is not helped by the lack of content, story and generally boring levels which means I can't recommend this unless on 75% sale.
Review & First Level: • Silverain Reviews: Karate Survivor
Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/3027930/Karate_Survivor/