KungFu Kickball

Kick the ball, ring the bell Get the L, go to hell Buy on sale!!!

KungFu Kickball is a console ported 2D retro pixel (most avid review readers, at this point, will already know all they need to know about this crapware) fighter/versus/PvP arena brawler with a twist... alongside the dumbed down and limited fighting controls (no combos or anything interesting like that), you have to bash a ball around and ring a bell to score points instead of just pummelling the AI into the ground. I say AI because botmatching is all you can do in the game... the quality is just too poor for this to have attracted any gamers so the online PvP component is dead. What a surprise, turns out gamers like quality. From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard. A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result. To make matters worse, while lazy, low quality pixel "art" has been used, making the game look bad, many elements of the game aren't done with pixelcrap... which accomplishes a couple of things. First, it shows the developers perhaps could have done better and they knew it, so that's a major screwup. Secondly, it destroys any hopes the developer had of creating a "retro aesthetic" as their excuse for the lazy pixelart compromise... It looks completely inauthentic from a retro gaming perspective. Visually, this is a hamfisted mess, a dogs breakfast of bad visuals, and this kind of laziness and poor quality should never be foisted on gamers. While there are options to change the resolution for the game, all this does is scale up the simplistic 2D art assets used to make the game, which makes little or no difference to the graphics quality. Without any other substantial graphics tweaks, it's not possible for gamers to improve the lacklustre 2D visuals. PC gamers will be insulted by the presence of console peasant children's toy controller prompts in a few places, despite this being on PC. Developers should try to be aware which platform they're developing for. Because this is designed for consoles, it carries a number of deliberate design deficiencies. Compromises were made to cater to the inferior console gaming appliances that the game was designed for. These are unfortunate compromises and limitations that PC gamers shouldn't be forced to accept, but it's evident that PC was a second thought for the console-centric developers. The game is deficient as a result of these choices, and would have been so much better without the handicaps that designing games for consoles forces upon a game. Once more, console peasants have made gaming worse for everyone. These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game. KungFu Kickball has the gamer gouging price of $17 USD, for which you could easily get any number of older AAA games. Given the defects and quality issues with the game, coupled with the unrealistic price, this is impossible to recommend. For comparison, the $17 asking price for this game could get you games like "The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt", "Grand Theft Auto V" or "Hearts of Iron IV". Quality, professionally made games like those are frequently on sale cheaper than this. There's also thousands of free, superior quality games on Steam.