"I'm Kick-Ass!" I Know, Already!
Most people have preconceived notions when it comes to licensed movie tie-ins. I certainly do, as there have been very few stand-out games in this vein. Similarly, many people have preconceived notions about brawlers, saying that all you have to do is "push X to win." Having played a few brawlers in my time, I don't, as there are many details that can make a brawler a challenging, engaging and rewarding experience or a monotonous slog through hundreds of cookie-cutter enemies. Kick-Ass is neither.
Kick-Ass is a isometric brawler based on the comic and movie of the same name. Developer Frozen Codebase borrows elements from both in an attempt to create a compelling experience, which they neither succeed or fail at. During the course of the game, the player will visit many familiar locales from the movie, such as the diner, lumber mill, and mob boss Johnny G's penthouse suite. Enemies ranging from common street thugs to bazooka-wielding hit-men provide fodder for Kick-Ass, Hit-Girl and Big Daddy as they work their way through Johnny Genovese's lieutenants, eventually reaching the boss himself... kind of.
The first thing you'll notice upon starting a game and running twenty feet down that first alley is how rushed and unpolished Kick-Ass feels. The models look like they're straight out of a PS2 game (reworked versions of the iPhone models maybe?) and the animation seems stilted and artificial. The sound isn't much better, as you'll hear the same few oddly-mixed and slightly compressed-sounding catch-phrases and one-liners throughout the entire experience.
But anyone who's played brawlers before knows that none of that really matters because you'll be way too busy concentrating on what you'll be doing almost non-stop throughout the experience - wrecking a whole mess of dudes. Making combat fun is the one aspect that brawlers absolutely have to get right. Unfortunately, Kick-Ass' combat rarely makes it past mediocre. There are light, heavy and jump attacks at the player's disposal, while wall-running is Hit-Girl-only move. Additionally, each character has two "hero abilities" that they can use in a pinch. While this may sound like a lot on paper, most of what you'll be doing is combinations of your light and heavy attacks; and I say "combinations" loosely because there doesn't seem to be any kind of formal combo system aside from Kick-Ass' slight variations on a typical square, square, square, triangle move. Oh, and their touted "finishers" can only be performed on bosses or boss-like enemies after draining their health bar, then by pressing circle. Fun. Fortunately, the game does a good job of throwing enough dudes at you at any given time to keep it challenging, but challenging and compelling are two different things.
Replay-ability is another concern for games in this genre. In this regard, Kick-Ass does a pretty good job of making the player feel like he or she is making progress, and rewards returning players somewhat. Experience points are gained by defeating enemies and destroying what looks like giant backpacks full of coke. After enough of these points are gained, the player levels up, gaining two or three points that can be put toward the character's defense, attack, or hero abilities statistics. While the enemies stay on par with you throughout the game for the most part, when you realize that those floating damage-indicating numbers changed from 10 or 20 to 150 or 200 somewhere during your play-through, you really do feel like you're dishing out the pain (especially of you dumped all those points into your defense and attack ratings like I did). Additionally, after you complete a play-through, you unlock "extreme" and "arena" modes, and each are exactly what they sound like. Extreme mode is the same campaign as before, but with beefed-up enemies and Arena mode drops you in a room with a seemingly-endless supply of baddies.
However, all this leveling-up is per character. This means that all those stat upgrades and mode unlocking is only for that character. While I can understand this decision, this could potentially make it a pain (or bore) to play through with a buddy when you have a level 28 Kick-Ass and he's rolling with a level 2 Big Daddy. This goes for the extra modes as well - you'll only be able to play extreme or arena mode with the characters you've completed the story with. While you'd probably get messed up pretty quickly with a under-leveled character in extreme mode, that doesn't mean that you couldn't pop into an arena to do some quick leveling, especially since the first few waves are a pretty good match for early characters.
