Crazy Kung Fu Review: an intensive fitness VR game

Today I review for your a nice indie game called Crazy Kung Fu, developed by the studio Field Of Vision. I promised one of the guys of the studio to review it in January, and well… probably I’m slightly late for the publication of this article (sorry Arnaud), but it has been cool having seen during these months the game gaining its share of satisfied users and taking part of nice initiatives like Lab Surprise. So, has it been worth waiting six months for this review? Discover it in this article!

Gameplay

Crazy Kung Fu is a game to keep you trained in performing kung fu moves. Beware that it is not a kung fu teaching experience: it doesn’t teach you kung fu at all. It just trains your reflexes in some basic actions of the kung fu martial arts. In particular, it teaches you how to punch, block, and dodge.

The game is all about these three actions. In all the levels, you see something like the trunk of a tree that is in front of you and has one or multiple “wheels” rotating around it. These wheels rotate constantly and as soon as they are completely behind the trunk, they randomly extract one of three possible items:

• A cushion, that you have to punch
• A stick, that you have to block
• A blade, that you have to dodge

Every wheel rotates, and as soon as its main part is hidden, it generates a new attack, that starts rotating towards you very fast. You have no idea of what will be generated next, so as soon as you discover what is that the wheel has generated, you have to react accordingly very fast, or you may miss hitting it in the right way. I want to stress this again because it is probably the biggest pro and con of the whole game: as soon as you discover what is your target object, you have to react to it immediately, or you’ll lose the opportunity of attacking it properly and so you will lose precious points.

This is the biggest pro of the game because it makes it a game that is amazing in training your reflexes, since you have no time to think, and the only thing you have to do is notice what has been generated and prepare your countermove in a blink of an eye. It is also the biggest con because sometimes you have very little time to react and the game may become too hard and frustrating.

Remember that you may have up to three wheels attached to the same log, so you have to react fast to three different objects that get generated, requiring sometimes weird movements together (e.g. you should dodge a sword while at the same time blocking a stick and then punch a target). The game becomes very frenetic, you can’t stop being concentrated, and you should keep punching, dodging, and blocking no-stop until the time is out. After 20 minutes of playing this game, I was soaking in sweat. It’s super-effective as a fitness experience and is also very good in training your reflexes. But as I said, sometimes it requires too much from the player, and in some levels, I’ve become pretty frustrated in trying to win them.

The game also penalizes you a lot for your errors. The more you perform the correct moves, the more your combo multiplier for the score increases from 1x up to 4x, but when you make an error, you return to 1x. The problem is that if you don’t have this multiplier high for the biggest part of the level you are playing, most probably you won’t reach the necessary score to win the level. So if you want to succeed, you must be careful in not making errors and prefer avoiding blocks instead of performing the wrong move. You have also to take into count that if you block with your wrist, sometimes the system will detect it as a punch, and so you have to be extra careful with how you block the sticks that rotate towards you if you don’t want to go back to a 1x. I have been pretty irritated by this kind of misdetections sometimes.

The main game mode, the one I have just described to you, is the training mode, which is composed of 15 levels, with every one of them lasting 60 seconds. The first ones are easy, but the more you go on, the more they will become complicated, with more wheels activating on each trunk, and then also with the trunks that start moving around your play space.

There is also another playing mode that is the “fighting” mode, where you have to fight against a special trunk that has many wheels, and moves all around the play area. This is pretty difficult and also requires you to have plenty of free space around you, otherwise, you risk punching your windows.

The “focus” mode is instead a basic training where you instruct the system about which mechanics you want to train about (e.g. punching and dodging), and it creates for you a custom level to train them.

There is also a part of the application devoted to teaching you something about kung fu, but it is very rough, and it looks just like a first draft. One of the biggest drawbacks of this game is that it doesn’t teach you that much: it doesn’t teach you kung fu, and it doesn’t even try to show you how you should perform the various actions required. At the end of each level there are some pieces of advice on how you could improve your movements (e.g. it says if you are punching too fast or too slow), but there’s no video or simulation that explains to you how you should punch or block. I think this part should be included in the game, otherwise, I risk repeating the same action done in the wrong way indefinitely.

The game also tries to exploit gamification to increase engagement and retention: every level has its own special challenges (e.g. perform everything with only one hand, finish the level with no errors, etc…), it has its dedicated leaderboard where you can see your ranking among all the other players of the world, there are achievements, and also there are modifiers to keep the game always challenging and entertaining. With the modifiers, you can make the levels easier or more difficult, and also add fancy stuff like shrimps that fall from the sky that when eaten give you some extra points (it is actually pretty fun!). Also, the game rewards your progress: some of the above gaming modes are unlocked only after you have completed enough levels of the training; plus the more you win the training levels, the more you win different environments for your training dojo. These tactics are all very welcome to increase the engagement of the player with the game.

Multimedia elements

Crazy Kung Fu is a nice indie game, but it clearly shows that it is a product made with a tight budget. The graphical elements are nice, but the graphics, at least on Quest where I tried it, looks very simplistic. And while I condone it on the training logs, I preferred to have much more details in the various dojo environments that you are awarded during the game. The visual quality is not bad, and for sure while you are concentrating in punching and dodging, you don’t notice the graphical details at all, but I think, with the right budget, the graphics could have been richer.

The audio suffers from the same problems: it does its job, but it is very repetitive.

Immersion

The mood of the game is nice: you find yourself in the dojo, all the writings are both in English and Chinese, and all the buttons are wooden tablets that you have to break with a punch. This is great to make you feel as really being in a dojo training yourself. The only problem, as I said before, is that the graphical elements are a bit simple, so you can’t feel immersed completely in the game environment, because you have clear reminders of the fact that you are in a game and not the real world.

The game is very frenetic and intense, so you don’t have much time to think about anything else if not punching, blocking, and dodging and this completely sucks you in. I can so fairly say that the game immersed me completely in the virtual world and made me forget about the real one.

Comfort

The game works only with room scale, so it is comfortable for everyone to play. As I said, it is very intense, so it is not “comfortable” to play in that other meaning, but this is a fitness game, so this has to be expected.

Price and availability

Crazy Kung Fu is available on SideQuest/App Lab for €10 and Steam for €8,20.

Final impressions

I enjoyed my time with Crazy Kung Fu: I was looking for something that made me move and stay fit, and it worked perfectly for the purpose: it made me move a lot, and soak in sweat. It also was perfect to train my reflexes because of the mechanic that gives you very little time to react after you have discovered what are the next attacks that are coming towards you.

It is not a perfect game, though: the multimedia elements could be better, but I guess it is a budget problem (and I feel the pain of the developers), so I can forgive that easily. What is more problematic is that I expected a bit more of kung fu training, a bit more lessons on how should I properly punch and defend in kung fu, while there was nothing of this kind, and the game left me practicing with my own techniques. I hope something of this kind will be added to the game soon.

The price is fair for what you get, and I think that if you are looking for a way to train in VR, Crazy Kung Fu could be great for that. Plus also remember that you can buy it at a discounted price together with other games if you are lucky enough in the VR Collection bundle.

I hope you liked this review, and of course, if you have something to say about this game, feel free to write it in the comments here and below! And if you want to make me happy, also share this post with your friends 🙂

(Header image by Field Of Vision)