Kung Fu Rider

The concept is wacky and loveable: office slave Tobio, and his barely dressed assistant Karin are chased by Chinese gangsters (for some reason), and they escape their pursuers by riding an office chair through the streets of China. Wonderful nonsense.

Watch out down below! Kung Fu Rider is a racing game spiced up by weird humour. You will face both physical obstacles like market stands and poorly parked cars along the way, not to mention members of the Triad who swing for your neck with fists and wands.

You control the action in Kung Fu Rider with the Move control, and I cannot find any real reason for this whatsoever. You point the controller towards the screen and shake it up and down to accelerate. You turn by turning the controller and you can also jump with a quick flick of the wrist. You chair driver can also kick and punch as he rides, which is performed with your thumb (preferably) and the Move button. You can also duck down, which activates a rather amusing animation where the main character looks at you with his upside-down face. This enables you to safely roll under 18 wheelers and the likes.

All of this works poorly to a greater or lesser degree and could have been handled excellently with a regular controller. I haven't played too many office chair racers, so this genre is pretty much up for grabs for anyone who takes it on. It is however easy to make a comparison to regular kart games, and controllers worked fine with them.

As I roll down the streets of China, it feels very cumbersome and every corner feels like a mountain to climb, and my attempts to accelerate are routinely mistaken for jumps, and vice versa. This is a fatal flaw in a game where you have to avoid things and time your actions. It's a very frustrating experience.

I could have dealt with it if it wasn't for the fact that there are so few checkpoints in the levels. The number of tumbles you can afford in each level are limited, so there are plenty of opportunities to make use of the filthier pages of your vocabulary.

It's almost embarrassing how repetitive Kung Fu Rider is. It's most evident when you start and finish levels. That's when Tobio or Karin utter the exact same phrase to the exact same animation. It looks cheap, in fact it looks so cheap it could be mistaken for an arcade title from the early 90's.

That takes us to the visuals, and at least they are pretty nice. From a spectators point of view it looks like an interesting chaos with a good sense of speed and smooth framerate. The environments are bustling with life and you will get that tingling sense in your stomach from the biggest jumps. However, the graphics are the only component of Kung Fu Rider to received a passing grade. It's another one of the lacklustre first wave of games to hit Playstation Move, and nothing you should spend your money on. That money is better spent on ModNation Racers or Joe Danger.