Preview: Kung Fu Hustle Pummels Net Cafes With Microtransactions

by Andrew Podolsky on August 21, 2007 at 5:52 pm

In the climactic battle of the film Kung Fu Hustle, the main character Sing, played by director Stephen Chow, soars so high up into the air that he is able to jump off the back of an eagle, see Buddha in the clouds, and fall back down to Earth with the force of a meteorite. In any videogame or movie since, you’d be hard pressed to come up with a more dramatic finishing move. Like Sing’s atmospheric ascension, expectations will be sky-high for a satisfying videogame adaptation of Kung Fu Hustle’s fights, but there may be a few design choices that bring that level of anticipation back down to Earth.

Designed primarily for the Chinese game cafe market, Kung Fu Hustle is an old school brawler with a fairly simple graphics engine. The game is divided into two parts—a side scrolling beat-em-up in the style of Double Dragon or Streets of Rage, and a versus fighting game like Street Fighter 2. The side scrolling game supports up to four players online while the versus mode supports up to eight.

Versus fighting takes place in levels modeled after real Chinese cities, where players can jump into different sections when a fight gets too crowded. The mission modes, on the other hand, will have a wider variety of levels and different enemy types to fight. Weapons such as wooden beams and sai blades are associated with different fighting styles and can be unlocked in mission mode, or purchased as micro-transactions and then used in versus mode. There is also a lobby system to allow players to chat before they begin a match, or line up for a chance to compete.

Kung Fu Hustle seems best suited for a local online experience in a LAN-enabled net cafe, so the typical American PC gamer at home on the computer might not get quite as much out of it. Still, Stephen Chow is directly involved in the game, so hopefully it will borrow heavily from the wacky sense of humor seen in his films. Although we didn’t get to see too much in the way of hilarity in a short video presentation, making a truly funny and customizable online fighting game does seem to be the developer’s primary goal.

While the game is coming out in the Asian market late this year, a North American release date still hasn’t been determined. We’ll bring you further information on Kung Fu Hustle as soon as we find out more and can play it for ourselves.

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