Oh boy, I loved Chuck Norris facts.
Ten years ago my friends and I had entire conversations about The Chuck. Kinda silly looking back but some of these jokes still crack me up.
Anyway, Xonox decided to develop and publish an action game based on the legend.
You are “Chuck Norris” trying to reach an ancient monastery to rescue a
famous leader that is being held hostage. BEWARE! Dangerous warriors lie
in waiting to spoil your efforts to reach your goal. You begin your journey
as a White Belt, the first belt in the sport of Karate. By defeating the
attackers, scoring points, and learning new martial skills, you will earn
each of the colored belts associated with the “Tang Soo Do” style of karate.
You must achieve the highest rank of all, the Black Belt, in order to reach
and enter the monastery which is guarded by the fearsome NINJA assassins.
Aah, the famous leader is in trouble yet again.
You only have six minutes to reach the monastery.
As you walk along the dirt path and try not touch the grass (because you lose a massive amount of time if you do) you will be thrown into an arena.
Here you have to fight numerous enemies with distinct weaknesses. Some can only be hurt by punches and others only by kicks.
Read the manual to stand a chance.
Fighting is weird.
You have to press into a direction and then hold the fire-button.
Like down+fire= kick.
Touching an enemy stuns you and getting hit by a ninja star teleports you back to the start of the stage.
Nice.
Oftentimes you will have numerous paths to choose and some are blocked with a tree trunk which means you have to walk back and fight again while the clock ticks mercilessly.
After surviving the second stage you learn a new move.
A somersault that ends in a kick.
This makes the game significantly easier.
When you finally reach the monastery you fight an endless wave of ninjas until time runs out.
Just like in real life, they can turn invisible.
Now, you get a bonus minute after every stage but don’t fool yourself into thinking you end up with more than one or two minutes for the finale.
First of all, Superkicks is friggin ugly.
Crappy colors (love that snot green), blocky environments and no details whatsoever. The few sound effects aren’t helping either.
Presentation-wise, this is a mess.
The gameplay on the other hand is…ambitious.
I like how they tried to work around the system’s shortcomings. It’s hard to make fighting interesting when you only have one button.
It also works fairly well once you’ve learned the somersault-kick.
The beginning tho is really confusing and frustrating.
This is what I screamed at my screen for the first five minutes:
“No, go up…NO PUNCH, BACK go back STOP BLOCKING CHUCK!!!”
You get the idea.
Also, losing time when touching the grass is complete bs, running into more than two dead ends means you can start over and why is there no ending?
You set up a silly/cool story so commit to it and give me proper ending with a boss fight instead of endless waves of ninjas.
That’s lame.
This all may sound like I really hate the game but I don’t.
The devs tried something new with limited resources and they mostly failed.
So what?!
Somebody had to test the waters, drown and serve as a stepping stone for future developers.
Thanks for your service Xonox. My 18-year-old me would’ve loved your game.
Chuck Norris Superkicks is the reason why Waldo is hiding.
(please don’t shoot me)
4/10
I Play All The Games 