Beat-em-ups are a genre that’s been around a long time, but like many old genres, it’s undergone its share of divergent evolution. Games such as Streets of Rage 4 stick to the old formula with slight tweaks, while games like The Wonderful 101 change the gameplay mechanics in major ways while keeping the same basic concept of “repeatedly hit enemies that swarm you in big groups until they’re gone, then move on and do it again.” Super Crush K.O. takes the beat-em-up concept and turns it in a different direction: into a 2D platformer with a big emphasis on jumping and racking up combos for points.
The game’s mood is very light-hearted and it gets to the point quickly. To illustrate, here is your story:
An alien invader named Ann breaks into your house and steals your pet cat. And she really, really does not want you to get your cat back, as she has sent an entire army of robots to stop you.
Considering your cat’s lack of owner loyalty, the stakes could hardly be lower. The surprise ending is cute and positive at least.
The presentation, from the colors to the music, is rather “bubblegummy.” As this is a rather low budget game, the four “worlds” you travel through in the city all use most of the same graphics other than a simple change of color scheme, but always keeping the same bubblegum aesthetic.
The gameplay combines a 2D platformer with beat-em-up mechanics and a heavy dose of air combat. The basic progression is this: move forwards until you reach the edge of the screen, enter next screen, and enemies spawn in. Beat all enemies and progress to the edge of the screen to enter the next area. Repeat until final group of enemies beaten, and you get your rank and score.
While the game is a platformer, for most of the game, the platforms and platformer-style obstacles are hardly the focus and instead it’s all about the combat. So let’s look over your moves.
The protagonist, Karen, has a standard punch that can be used unlimited times, a homing kick that can be used to knock enemies back, a gun which targets the nearest enemy it’s pointed at and does very little damage before being recharged, and a powerful charged beam that hits everything in a straight line, and can only be used once a meter slowly fills up. The button used to perform the homing kick can also be used to slam the ground or do a roll along the ground which also doubles as an attack.
Aside from those attack moves, Karen can do a dodge move that passes through all enemy attacks and hazards to basically give her invincibility frames. This dodge can be used in mid-air as well as on the ground. Crucially, you can cancel out of attacks to perform this dodge. Attack cancelling becomes important in the late game if you’re chasing rank.
All of your moves except the basic punch have limits, in the form of a recharging meter that goes down when you use them. This forces you to use more move variety, and to get more comfortable with the situations which each move excels in.
The moves are all quick and responsive. Not only do moves end quickly, but many can be cancelled to switch to another move before the first one is finished. This is pretty much the opposite of the slow, “heavy” combat in games that require you to commit to a slow, deliberate attack before you do anything else. Instead, Karen’s sheer agility and flexibility is a big part of what makes this game play the way it does.
That agility and flexibility are sorely needed, because of what you’ll be running up against. There are a handful of enemy types, but they have some variety with their attack moves. Some charge at you, some lunge forwards, some shoot bullets at you that can be either avoided or passed through with your invincible dodge ability.
But another feature that makes this game different from other beat-em-ups, and helps make its barrage manageable, is the fact that all enemies telegraph their moves with visual tells.
The above picture shows many examples of just that. Enemies with white lightning bolts over their heads are about to attack, but their attack can be interrupted. Enemies with red lightning bolts are about to perform an uninterruptible attack, so they must be avoided or dodged through. Enemies that can jump or fly will have chevrons come out of them indicating the direction they’re about to lunge in. There are also some enemies that leave behind a bomb which flashes red before exploding slow moving bullets in all directions.
Since you are warned about everything, the game is always fair. The game becomes about reading the room and reacting to a changing situation even before it changes. All projectiles are slow and easy to avoid individually, though add in charged up enemies ready to attack, and things get even more chaotic.
Many fights become about crowd management as multiple enemies spawn in. That’s where deep knowledge of your abilities comes in handy.
Your homing kick move lets you easily home in on any enemy, including flying enemies, and quickly take them out. Your gun automatically targets any one enemy if you’re pushing in or facing its general direction, which also helps with flying enemies, particularly ones that are in attack mode. Since most enemy attacks are interruptible, performing the right move can help prevent them from attacking immediately. Your kick also knocks enemies slightly into the air, perfectly interrupting attacks.
What’s more, you can use these moves to help group up enemies where you want them. If a row of enemies is lined up along the ground, performing the kick in the direction you want to push them helps group them together into one spot, making it easy to then perform a barrage of normal punches to take them out at once. Your attacks are capable of hurting multiple enemies in the same spot at the same time, so this “grouping” strategy works wonders. As the picture above shows, where four enemies are being beaten on at once!
The nature of the game largely depends on your level of skill.
For players who haven’t mastered the art of dealing with all of the chaos, survival itself is a struggle. You get five reserve lives per level, and then it’s back to the level select screen. This is likely what most younger or less experienced players will find challenging about the game.
On the other hand, players accustomed to crowd control and move cancelling will have a much easier time with survival itself, so the game instead becomes about something different: score attacks and ranks.
The game is heavily combo-based. All attacks add to the combo and raise a rank shown in the corner of the screen. If you go a few seconds without hitting any enemy, or if you take any damage at all, the rank drops to a D and you have to go back to trying to raise it again.
Since any attack at all raises the combo, this means doing things like pushing enemies into easy-to-hit positions with your kick attack, chaining together multiple attacks when possible, or even shooting a distant enemy with a gun simply to keep the combo going while you try to get close enough to hit it directly. Not getting hit is important, but so is keeping the combo going if you’re going for score.
Which turns the game into a risk/reward situation where things that help keep the combo going, such as attacking enemies to prevent them from attacking, or pushing enemies together into a single spot, can also put you at greater risk of being attacked. Though at the same time, not taking out enemies quickly does create its own risk even for people not chasing score: the more enemies there are active at once, the more danger you are in.
At the end of the level, you receive points bonuses for things like not getting hit once, beating the level quickly, and never dying once. There’s also a “perfect combo,” which means a totally uninterrupted combo that never stops either due to getting hit or the combo timer running out.
Your best score and rank are saved for each level, and there are online leaderboards (submitting your score is optional and not automatic) if you want to compare yourself to other players. The leaderboards are not searchable though, and it’s hard to tell if, say, coming in 472nd place is a good thing or a bad thing.
Aside from enemies, there are obstacles and other level elements. At first there are barely any, and they seem to exist mostly before fights. In the later levels, there are many more obstacles, resulting in navigating the hazards while also fighting becoming an important part of gameplay.
Some of these elements include jump pads that propel you high into the air if you jump while standing on them, and pads that give you a large boost of speed to the side if you dodge or kick while on them.
Besides those, there are many obstacles that can cause harm. Laser beams that trigger two seconds after you pass through them, spikes that activate two seconds after you walk on them, platforms that disappear after being stood on before they reappear, and spiked wheels that slowly travel along a path. These mix in with enemy groups to make the fights even more challenging and tricky.
Each of the game’s four worlds has four levels and a boss fight. And the boss fights are very simple and similar. In fact, it’s even a running joke that all the bosses have the same naming structure, all literally being named “Mecha One,” “Mecha Two,” etc.
The bosses, just like the regular enemies, all telegraph their attacks with the red lightning bolt warning and often a pose that indicates which of their attacks they’ll do. At one point, regular enemies will show up so they can be taken out for a health refill in case the player took any damage. Boss fights are arguably easier than chaotic fights against groups of enemies and tricky placement of obstacles!
Super Crush K.O. is a short game built around replay value for the very skilled. Players who find mere survival alone challenging can get their play value from simply trying to reach the end. Players who have mastered survival can work on their combo skills. And players who have mastered their combo skills can try to get S ranks on every level and focus on getting high scores onto the leaderboards. The game basically offers things for different groups of people.
A bubblegummy 2D platformer beat-em-up starring a lady who takes out killer robots to rescue her pet cat from an alien is probably not the direction people thought the beat-em-up genre would evolve in, but with the indie scene, anything is possible. And a game with this style of gameplay and this style of theme could only have come from there.
