Kung Fury: Street Rage - Ultimate Edition is, as its title makes clear, a game based on the viral internet mini-movie Kung Fury, a 2015-released ultra-OTT spoof of 1980s buddy-cop flicks full of slapstick action, deliberately hammy performances and meme-birthing non sequiturs. It’s very loud and very silly, and you can (should you wish) watch the whole thing on YouTube right now. And yes, that’s that Hackerman. And yes, that is Hitler being wallopped in the testicle. Street Rage was previously available on Steam, but is now heading to consoles in its Ultimate Edition - and it’s this version that I played at Gamescom 2022.
Here’s a trailer for Kung Fury: Street Rage - Ultimate Edition, coming to Switch soon
Sitting down with a representative from the game’s publishers, Sweden’s Aurora Punks (the movie is also Swedish), we carve our way through a series of levels, from a beach to the sewers to a virtual synthwave world of all-neon everything, in the Ultimate Edition’s co-op two-player mode. As the trailer and screens suggest, this is a throwback-styled side-scrolling beat ‘em up, and a simple one at that: one button for blows tapped at speed for combos, another to dash and push enemies back to clear space, and a third for a special move that you need to fill a meter to use which is effective over a modest radius. It’s basic, and it’s a blast - especially with a second player. The one thing that’s weirdly lacking is a jump button, which takes a second to get used to; but once you click with Kung Fury’s rhythms, you’re in and smiling like the laser raptor that got the cream.
And what you’re so immediately into, knee deep and surrounded on all sides, is wave after wave of Nazis. Again, following the plot of the film, Kung Fury and his crew - the Triceratops-faced Triceracop, the machine gun-toting Viking warrior Barbarianna, Hackerman in his robotic Hackerbot mode, and, um, David Hasselhoff as David Hasselhoff - have to fight their way through to the ‘Kung Führer’ himself, who’s been messing with the flow of time and needs messing up. It’s dumb, it’s fun, and it probably won’t occupy you for too long - but this is a score-setting and achievements-chasing sort of experience, less about the time spent from start to finish and more the buzz of bloodily exploding a sizeable slice of the Third Reich.
I’ll rewind there: yes, you can play as David Hasselhoff. He’s in the movie, in a voice-over role, but in Streets Rage - Ultimate Edition you can control the man who so powerfully delivered ‘Looking for Freedom’ at the Berlin Wall on New Year’s Eve 1989 and was never off the tellybox in the 1990s thanks to Baywatch. When fighting as The Hoff, your attacks will include a devastating flash of chest hair which not only stops baddies in their tracks but ultimately disintegrates them. Only in video games, only in video games. Sadly I didn’t have long enough at my Gamescom appointment to reach Hitler himself and pound him into so much meat sauce - or, y’know, let Thor do that with his massive electric hammer - but fans of Streets of Rage 4, Scott Pilgrim vs The World and the recent Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Shredder’s Revenge (and, of course, actual beat ‘em ups of the 1980s and ‘90s) are advised to keep an eye on this one, assuming they've not played it in a previous guise. It’s not in the league of those greats, and the lack of a jump is a decision, but when has punching Nazis to death ever not been a great time?
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Kung Fury: Street Rage - Ultimate Edition releases later in 2022 for Nintendo Switch, PlayStation and Xbox consoles, and PC.
Featured Image Credit: Aurora PunksTopics: Indie Games, Nintendo Switch, Preview