Okinawa Rush

Review

Okinawa Rush is a 2D side-scrolling beat ‘em up, that focuses on feudal Japan with era-appropriate themes and conflicts. This is another game that wants to get into the new gold rush that is Arcade gaming on PCs and Consoles. Trying to bring an authentic arcade combat experience, Okinawa Rush did a bang on job at it.

But it failed immensely on some other parts, where they should’ve focused a bit more; I’ll get to that later.

Plot: You get to play as three different characters’ martial arts master Hiro, Meilin, or Shin and you will be going against The Black Mantis clan. Each character gets their own stories which are revealed in stages, and they all have endings.

Although short, and a bit messy, they’re still better than nothing.

Hiro: As Black Mantis Clan entered Okinawa, Hiro was out of his home. Having known that the clan attacked and murdered his family, Hiro is now out for vengeance.

Shin: Our second character, Shin, is a monk, who went after the Black Mantis Clan after he found out that the clan attacked and left a mark on his student.

Meilin: Last is Meilin, in search of her father. She ran into the clan and from that, her conflict with them began.

Gameplay: Okay, so first of all let’s get the worst part out of the way.  The game wants to be an Arcade game; good.  It wants to use some Arcady controls and UI; also good.

But while doing all that, the devs seem to have forgetten about the part of user-friendly UI, controls, and everything else! It took me 10 minutes every time for the first few times I tried to play, just trying to figure out the game.

Nothing worked; not Space, Enter, ESC, Mouse Left! Then I tried Mouse Right and the game crashed! Tried again and again, and this happened every time.

Turns out they put exit on the mouse right without marking it or putting any indication on the screen, and most of the menu is something like this.

Luckily the gameplay itself was pretty decent, I mean the combat part of it. Pretty well justified and balanced in terms of an arcade-like experience.

The game itself is very difficult even for an arcade game, those who love some challenge might find this aspect interesting.

Combat: As short bits of your back story are revealed during combat, you become more enraged and engaged in combat, nothing can stop you! Unless you forgot to remap the controls.

Although Okinawa Rush’s combat is mostly a two-button deal with movement coordination and jumps, you are not gonna do well unless you change it up to something you’re comfy with.

The game lets you buy items for your DOJO, which in turn will bump up your stats. Which is all good, until I found out while trying to shuffle through them that my items were removed, and I had no way of getting them back. Or I just couldn’t find any!

There’s a lot more going on in the game; some things are really cool and some got a bit messy due to poor execution, which am hoping will get patched soon.

World Design: Visually I think Okinawa Rush is stunning, from its lighting to art to its level design. It was supposed to be based around Feudal Japan, but it more or less turned into an enhanced parody scenario, which is good as well, I guess.

Music and sound effects: Impactful and rich sound effects, I honestly wasn’t expecting this to be so good. Hey, I’ll come back for more of this.

The same can be said for its retro-ish music, just awesome.

Review written by BiteMexD for Zeepond.com!

Okinawa Rush Steam Store Page