A stellar beat-em-up for fans of the TV show but with many small flaws.
I grew up during the Nintendo days where games based on movie/book/TV show IP always sucked (think Back to the Future, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Hudson Hawk, etc.) and figured this was just going to be some cheap cash-grab game. I assumed based on the graphics that it was going to be a basic game, but I learned from the Langrisser I-II remake that “mobile-quality graphics” could be deceiving. I gave it a chance because the Cobra Kai show was amazing, and I didn’t want the feeling of watching Johnny’s to end. It more than met my expectations, though bugs and questionable gameplay decisions did occasionally frustrate me.
The Positives
-This scratched my Cobra Kai itch after I binged the last few seasons and wanted more. They had a few of the real actors from the show voicing their characters. The other voice actors were mostly passable (only one or two characters didn’t sound much like the actors).
-Surprisingly, the game has checkpoints for the longer levels—if they played like the shorter street levels, the game might’ve become too difficult for some players to beat. I was surprised that dying didn’t hurt your score, but I guess this allows players to die and retry parts that they didn't do well on.
-The story and gameplay are so well aligned to the TV show. While it does suffer from the “we can't introduce new canon and so have to retread storylines from the TV show” problem, it wasn’t in conflict with the show like NES-era games. The gameplay was awesome, as Hawk has the cool screaming hawk sound and abilities in line with his persona, you get the crane kick, etc. Very fun.
-The enemy variations are awesome, and I even liked the fact that there were a lot of mid- and end-bosses of the minor levels that were just souped-up regular enemies because it gave them a new dynamic knowing you’d have to fight one enemy forever while the others kept coming (that used to be a way to be efficient with game cartridge memory, but it works here just to mix it up without requiring ~20 new enemies).
-This is both a positive and a negative: they can throw deadly enemy combinations at you. It’s quite a good challenge when you learn that, say, you can’t leave the biker floating around because it’ll hit you from far away while you’re fighting enemies. The only negative of this is that they often put you in a narrow row or column with the worst combination of enemies for that tight space, making it feel a little cheap sometimes without room to dodge. But, otherwise, the mix is very diverse with new combinations coming at you regularly.
The Negatives
-The game has boss bugs that soft lock you out of the game, unfortunately. One time, it completely froze my game. Another time, it got me stuck with waves of sidekick enemies that I had to die from to respawn. This drove me nuts since you only get credit for achievements when the level ends, so I lost a few that I had to redo.
-For a game that requires precision in terms of your attack variations and dodging, the game is buggy. One time, I had a wall just displaying in the middle of my fight with four or five enemies that are all deadly unless you move up and down. Since I couldn’t see above the wall, I had to fight below the wall in a line and lost like two characters in that battle. Stuff like that, the fact that items and health will be scrolled out during normal combat, the fact that you’ll pick up an item instead of ground-attacking, and the boss bugs made me not trust the game to not bug out if I was on an S-level run, making me hold my breath every time I played. This even applied to a few of the counts in the ability level-ups: before a level, I’d have 60 of the ability uses; afterwards, I’d have 31 (and it wasn't an in-one-level achievement).
-The game is awesome in terms of having to hold combos and vary your moves for the highest score, but then it makes you go from one scene to another where you lose your combo. The worst part is that they do the frustrating thing beat-em-ups do and have enemies hiding just off screen where they credit you as being able to hit them but you can’t unless you have a long-range attack and a good bit of luck. Your success in the game should not be based on the RNG of whether an enemy feels like appearing from off screen in a timely fashion or not.
-The biggest mistake I made in the game was walking into an enemy and getting into a grab I couldn’t get out of, resulting in me getting hit by another enemy. Similarly, the leg throw is infinitely better than the ground-and-pound because you’re a sitting duck for other enemies sitting on top of a ground enemy.
-I personally had problems with the cooldown lengths. I know that they go down when you punch and kick and you shouldn’t spam the same button, but what happened was that I would do great until I accidentally hit the wrong button where the cooldown wasn’t done yet, and it would ruin a great combo I had going. The game's grade system rewards you for not spamming by preventing you from getting No Mercy combos that way, so 15-second cooldowns after hitting the wrong button is brutal. I think adjusting things like the cooldown length, whether the move is consumed when it misses, the retries, or other settings in the menu would’ve been great for players of different skill levels while still requiring the same move diversity to get an S rank.
-I loved the RPG mechanics, but there are two mastery abilities that required 1,000 hits. I would play entire levels and only get ~25 hits total. That means I’d have to play 40 levels to earn it, which is insane since I’d have to play every level twice—not even counting if there was a count but (which I did encounter a few times). I mastered every ability except for those two (Miguel’s and Hawk’s), which I got to 500 each through achievement-hunting gameplay. No way that you should have to hit at least 334 enemies (@ 3 hits each) to master when others just require using them to kill 3 mini-bosses, taking about ~25 minutes.
-The Power-Up mechanic plays like random luck. Why? Because, to keep your combo, you have to keep fighting. So, when you pick up the gi and belt, you have no idea what they do. So, you keep fighting. I rarely stopped between sections when I did have down time to actually hit the select button and see what they did. So, I just treated it as random bonuses that triggered whenever I accidentally got them. They need a better system for telling you what they do—give them short names, have them pop up, or give them a letter or something like in the old Contra games. I never knew what the power-up I had did, so I never changed my play style based on it.
-Some of the levels are long. They seem to take 30-45 minutes to get through, especially if you had a bug or died and had to restart from a checkpoint. And some of the enemies feel like they take forever to kill when you level up your character (a guide on the internet told me that they get more health as you get more abilities). Not a problem; it only bothered me because of the bugs mostly, but hitting the same enemies 20+ times only to move to another area and hit the same enemies 20+ times can feel like a lot after a while.
Overall, I surprisingly loved the game. It is reminiscent of some of the best in history like the Streets of Rage and Final Fight series, but it has the Cobra Kai characters and many moves, abilities, power-ups, and skill trees to keep it interesting and engaging. I had enough fun where I played to get as many achievements as I could for fun, which is a sign of a good game. I did have quite a few issues that dragged it down from being an all-time classic, but it was a fun game reminiscent of some of the best in the genre plus the fun of playing as Cobra Kai characters, and that’s enough for me to recommend it.
