Players Can’t Believe $40 Karate Kid Brawler Has Such Bad-Looking Cutscenes

The Karate Kid: Street Rumble looks like your average modern 2D beat ’em up: button mashing combos, neat retro pixel art, and little stylish touches that bring out the nostalgia for people in love with the source material. But something went terribly, terribly wrong during the $40 game’s brief story cutscenes.

The arcade brawler’s individual side-scrolling levels are stitched together by short, barely animated panels that loosely highlight the major events in the Karate Kid movies, from Daniel LaRusso getting beat-up shortly after moving to LA, to he and Mr. Miyagi leaving for Okinawa, Japan when the latter’s father is dying in the sequel. These moments look cheap, rushed, and more in line with a spam ad for a fake mobile game than the rest of the game’s vibrant pixel art.

They are, frankly, a mess that feels weirdly inserted into the rest of what looks like dutiful but competent proceedings. The scenes might be better ripped out of the game entirely, if it weren’t for how entertaining they are to encounter while watching others play on Twitch or YouTube. It’s like a encountering one “It’s so bad it’s good” train wreck to gawk at after another.

Here’s what a cutscene looks like vs. the actual gameplay:

Unfortunately, The Karate Kid: Street Rumble is also $40, which is nearly double every other modern, retro-styled brawler in the genre, including other licensed names like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge. Maybe that’s why the game has fewer than 10 user reviews on Steam, with many of the ones that do exist expressing shock at the price tag juxtaposed with the bad cutscene art.

“The first problem I noticed was in the very first cut scene at the start of stage 1,” wrote on Steam reviewer. “If you are going to charge $40 for your licensed game, please at least get Daniel to actually look like Daniel and not some 30 year old random guy. I encourage everyone to take a short break from this review, go to YouTube, Google a long play of this, and watch the first cutscene. It is so bad it is worth witnessing for yourself.”

Hopefully the game eventually gets a steep price cut from publisher GameMill Entertainment, so that more people actually get to see the small Argentina-based team Odaclick Game Studio’s beautiful pixel art. It doesn’t deserved to be lumped in with last year’s truly ugly Walking Dead game or the epically bad Skull Island: Rise of Kong, even if the cutscenes do.

GameMill Entertainment did not immediately respond to a request for comment.