KickBeat Steam Edition

I'm not much of a rhythm game kinda guy but I like what KickBeat is doing here. I only wish that it did more. With only 24 tracks, there is little variation in genre. Not a bad selection by any means, I just was not expecting it to be mostly Hard Rock/NuMetal.
Visually it looks good, and has a lot going on screen. At first, this can be very challenging but overtime you ease into it. Probably just as entertaining to watch as it is to play. Story would fit right in the era of cartoons such as Jackie Chan Adventures, Xiaolin Showdown, and American Dragon - It was entertaining.
For some reason, the game does not want to cooperate with the Steam overlay. Not really a problem, just an obstacle to navigate around. This game is cheap, and worth the price, but It wouldn't hurt to wait for a sale. Pick it up when you get the chance.

Kickbeat is a fun musical rhythm game similar to Guitar Hero but instead of slamming on the Guitar your kicking peoples faces and pulling off combos. It offers a decent challenge as you progress through its song list and your enjoyment can be enhanced by importing your favorite songs and kicking the enemies to the beat.

This is a fun little rhythm game done that is of about double A kinda quality the kind of double A that you'd see on the xbox live arcade era, a small team of 30-40 or so people so you know that it isn't gonna blow your mind or anything. What it does though it does well, and I was really surprised at its varied music selection, even having some big names like Rob Zombie and Papa Roach!

For the record before I give out judgements, I played through the story mode on hard difficulty as that was about match to my skill and was a mix of challenging and fun. Before I start too, I will make one request.. please make a borderless window mode!! Fullscreen really sucks when you have a two monitor (or more) setup. Why also is there only a manual offset setting, why not use what's already there with custom music's bpm calculator for setting your offset?

The story mode is about 24 tracks, played twice to go through as each character to experience the full story. I'd recommend pacing it out a little with a day long break or so that when you have to play through the songs again it doesn't feel too repetitive. You don't need to binge every game after all, and I enjoyed myself much better when I did take a break instead of feeling the need to grind through the latter half with the feeling of almost done beating the game.
Albeit it still is a little bit repetitive having to play through the songs again with only some variation coming in with the cutscenes.

The story.. I actually found rather enjoyable despite what others have said. By no means is it good per say, but their focus definitely wasn't in telling a gripping tale. It revels in its cheesiness, and it's just honestly fun. There was a few really goofy moments that caught me so off guard that I giggled.

When you can get into the flow of the song and get really good, it's also feels very satisfying. You really do feel like a badass kung-fo movie protag when you really start kicking ass, it's very visceral and satisfying to fend off such a huge crowd of mooks. The hit sounds are punchy, and it sounds good when you are hitting on beat.

I think my main issue with the game is.. man, the system of getting bonuses just sucks. Flat out, that is unpleasant. Having to double tap a button that isn't always to a beat and it doesn't have any sound indicator that you hit on any beat just really breaks the flow going on especially on the blue faster enemies where it feels even more awkward as you pretty much have to double tap between beats and quickly hit the next. When it gives a lot of the bonuses in a row it can legitimately feel fatiguing on the hands too, some levels have more than half the enemies have at least the 500 point bonus ones and often grouped up together. I found more enjoyment in the game in sections where it didn't have any bonuses to collect, like the helicopter boss was my favorite level for that reason and I saw it in the more fun parts of the song 'I Can't Wait' and etc. was when I could focus on the flow and there was very little powerups to collect. There was also some parts where the powerups made sense to the beat though, like it was decently done in 'Last Resort', although I think it'd feel so much better if it was less yellow enemies with powerups but more so just two blue enemies clustered rather close.

This issue is honestly at its worse with the boss. Aggravated also by the tentacles feeling weird to hit, I am not sure if I am just not getting the beat right or if there is some change to timing and making me hit off beat but I struggled a lot with that boss and it wasn't from me feeling overloaded. The whole gimmick of it with the damaging powerups just make things all the worse, as the already unpleasant and flow breaking hits are now necessary.

I'd honestly love a mod that would just auto collect the bonuses for me, detecting them and auto doubling my input. It'd actually let me enjoy the game a ton.

If there ever is a second, or hell even this game but redone just a little I'd hope that the bonus system is either removed or heavily reworked. Like honestly I think it'd be so much better that instead of a double tap, it is something like you only collect the powerup if you hit that respective note at a great or higher timing. Removing the 500 point bonus and making the other ones a little more rare (You could even put in the occasional point bonus, but a higher point bonus to balance the sparser powerups)
Make the final boss more engaging with something like a slow health drain (Because he doesn't play fair, cheating in his own simulation) and you have to hit trickier notes that have health restores. Balancing so it doesn't require perfection, and you could miss a few health restores but still be able to manage to recover so it can reach a tenseness instead of frustration of "Oh I just missed this one note now I am dead"

Another feature that might be nice would be the ability to make charts for this game and upload it via Steam Workshop functionality. It's something more rhythm games should have, as it will extend a game's lifespan quite a bit more. The automated play your own tunes thing is a nice idea, but full automation of that is rough. It only looks at the BPM of a song, but it doesn't have anything else like telling the intensity of the track and reacting accordingly with the enemy placements.


Anyways, I enjoyed the game though. Just if you get this expect a game that's rather rough around the edges.

This game had a lot to love. Fun animations, cool fighting. I wish the moves were distributed throughout the game rather than through a tutorial in the beginning though.

I really liked the game by the first sight. I really wanted to like it even after I bought it and played a few fights. But I can't...

KickBeat is a quite good-looking mixture of rhythm and beat'em up genres. In fact, even now, at the very beginning of the year 2019, you can't call rhythm/beat'em up mix project with better visuals, than we had in KickBeat in 2015. However... it's not so well both in rhythm and kicking butts.

There goes my downvote:

- first of all, let's talk about music. The game holds 24 tracks: some electromusic, some new wave rock and some rap. The player can add other music into freeplay, but have to unlock that option first. And no, you can't skip the tracks, mix them, line them in another order or anything. You have to beat them right one after another, even if you don't like the particular vibe... Get me right: some of the tracks of this game is in my own personal playlist. However, I, for instance, can't really stand the dubstep. While someone else wouldn't like some rock music track - the game cares not about it.

- so yeah, no matter how do you like the one particular song, you have to cut through it, and there goes another trouble: the rhythm don't actually fits! The main 24 tracks, with the various amount of enemies depending from the difficulty, supposed to be right in time with the tunes. But they are not! If you'll try to follow the music and do some action based on the tune, like in some other rhythm games - you'll be squared quite quickly! So you actually need to follow the visuals, while the sound goes after that. You may not notice the problem on the first few levels on the normal difficulty... but farther you go, more obvious that problem with non-sync tunes will be. And yeah, of course, if the devs couldn't made the proper timings with the given tracks, guess how well the game will treat the downloaded tracks? Yeah, far from perfect, to say the least.

- the visuals. I said they are good, and they are. But, every song is 2-4 minutes long, that means 120-240 enemies per level (sometimes more), and the moves we gonna perform are quite limited. 4 kicks, and about 20 variations of it, and that's all. You'll see them all in one level 4-5 times at least, and be bored about them 4-5 tracks after. With the rise of difficulty and number of enemies on the level, you'll be quite bored by constant dissemination of those enemies, to the point of actual harm to the eyesight.

- You can't follow the rhythm, and the visuals aren't clear with what to expect next... but even more in addition to illogical and confusing solutions goes for the bonuses! Some enemies on the level will be carrying some surplus which you're supposed to catch by hitting the same button after the kick for a second time. Believe me, it is really knocks the pace of the game even more.

I think that's enough by now to make a conclusion: KickBeat is a rhythm game without rhythm and fighting game without actual feeling of the fight, since you can't call the shots and only performing super-long QTE all game long. Without any proper reward. Therefore, my mark is 5/10 (and it's that high only thanks to visuals and Some of the music in the game). However, I can't actually recommend KickBeat to anyone, since it's broken in the way that can't be fixed.

Русская версия обзора на сайте: https://specialgamesclub.ru/user-reviews/kickbeat-ne-samyj-udachnyj-eksperiment/. Больше аргументации! Больше скриншотов! Больше вёрстки!

I wish Steam had a rating or meh button. I like this game but at the same time, I hate it. The idea, the story, the songs are what I expect from a rhythm beat game. BUT! Whoever had the bright idea to match the background colors with the minions, who are color coordinated, and made the first boss fight needs to be slapped. Yes, there are white lines and the 4 arrows light up for a second to let you know but when you're at a skew, can't see how many buttons you need to press the game becomes infuriating. Which there is this odd delay between my button input and the game. I know it can't be my controller because I tested with just a keyboard and my PC has a GTX 1080 so I doubt its that either. Also the custom tracks you can add can only go up to 6 mins and you have to set the bpm. SO yeah....mixed feelings.

this game reminds me of the Keep the beat like games like Parapa the rappa back on the PS1 ah good times any way this game ROCKS the story is decent with nice art work the gameplay is solid with flashy graphics and simple and easy to understand controls and the Music just so Awesome

HOWEVER this game has a rather high difficulty curve and the turtoral won't really help out much as this game has very fast pace gameplay

and sadly it has some rather nasty Bugs one being and this is also a Recomendation to players DISABLE the Steam Overlay for this game unless you like the frame rate to drop every time you get an achevment

and i also like to say something about the mode not fetured in other versions of this game the game mode where you can make your own stages up to me this is what i would call an expiermental add on simply due to the fact it would never ever reach the same qauality as the games main playlist

but all in all if you like to kick some minion butt to the sounds of music this game is SO for you

plus it has Massive Replay value



Ups

graphics
story
gameplay
soundtrack
replay value rewards

mehs

leader board
expiremental game mode

bads

steam overlay bug
no multi player game mode
rather high difficulti curve



final verdict

an awsome keep the beat Kung-Fu game
if you like Gitar Hero or some other kind of keep the beat play style games this is on i highly recomdend for you

i give this game

9/10

It was the frist game i played inside this kind of games, but i can say i loved it. The gameplay i hard at the beggneing, but when you get the hand of it you will actually enjoy this game. A lot.
It comes with Story Mod, which is also pretty cool, with two different playable Character (another 2 that later you'll unlock by getting all the stars), but the songs and enviroments on the story of each character are the same, so there isn't much diversity in that.
The beat your own music freature is a good concept, but needs to be developed a little bit more. It's confusing and we can't customize our songs to looks as good as the ones that came with the game.
The more you progress and win more stars on each track on different difficultys, you'll unlock rewards, which mainly are skins for the playable character.

I'd say this is a game worth to buy

Kickbeat is a really fun game, if you have the patience to get over a learning curve. It’s a bit hard at first, but if you stick with it, it’s a fun play. Imagine something like Sequence or DDR on a keyboard. The story is cheesy, the graphics are beautiful. You play as a ninja whose moves are determined by your pecking at the keyboard in a colored correspondence to music. The music is mostly rock from bands you’ve probably never heard of sprinkled with a little Rob Zombie and Marilyn Manson as well. It’s a refreshing take on the whole DDR for lazy people genre. Worth a play if you’re into these types of games. If you’re looking for humor, go with Sequence, if you’re looking for variety of music, go for Kickbeat. 7/10

I wouldn't recommend this game to people who like to play rhythm games. Firstly the soundtrack that the game comes with is ok, it's not bad but it certainly isn't that great either, but this will most likely depend on your music tastes. The tracks tend to be a mix of techno, electronic with some rock/metal elements to them. It would seem that the ability to play your own music is a great asset of this game however this particular feature falls very short. This is due to the fact that when selecting a song to add to the game you have to go through a beat calulator process by which you manually tap spacebar to the rhythm of 3 different sections of the song. The beats per minute are capped at a certain level so you can't just go crazy with the system. Equally probably the most annoying thing is that you can add any track you like however if the track is longer than 6 minutes anything past the 6 minute mark will be cut off entirely. These 2 flaws don't really make the add your own music feature appealing and the system for calculating beats doesn't work all that well in fitting enemy timing with the song rhythm and comes of rather clunky.

If you are looking for a good rhythm game I would recommend avoiding this title particularly if you wish to play your own music.

This game had so much potential. The concept is good, the art is trippy, the music selection is cool, but is unplayable, and in multiple ways.

Just minutes after purchasing was suffering of random crashes in the middle of a cutscene or song while playing and had to do multiple restarts of the app. Not to mention, the game has a really off timing. Yeah, sure, you can get "used to it" but it doesn't feel fair and no other quality rhythm game out there forces you to play like that, hell, I'd be better playing without any audio!

As a seasoned veteran in all things DDR, PIU, beatmania, Guitar Hero and stuff, this was really a dissapointment, most of all coming from cool guys like Zen Studios, who I love for they pinball games. Next time, better put a sync button on the options or something, don't force people to play your way, make the game fluid, like it should. For now, it's an unplayable disaster and you would have much more fun playing Stepmania for free on your PC.

Enjoy the money Zen, you don't deserve it.

if you've ever played with a hand-held game of Simon by milton bradley (and didn't rage afterwards), this game's for you.

i like the concept of adding rhythm to the old MB idea but its required REACTION time to press buttons is TOO rigid.

the slider on that built-in metronome doesn't allow you slack for syncopation either.

remember, we're human beings, not machines... our timing is NOT digital --- this game should allow for a bit of syncopation like most modern karaoke console does for singers.

i like it but I'm a bit torn.

for now, as it is --- it's not worth $9... maybe $5.

Good idea: Making a rhythm game where the beatmaps make sense and, if they're needed, visual cues are unobstructed.

Bad idea: Making a rhythm game where the beatmaps seem to follow random elements and instruments of each song, sometimes changing multiple times throughout any one verse or chorus. A verse, for instance, could start following the drums on the downbeat, then suddenly switch to following the guitar riff, or the vocalists' phrasings, then switch for the bassline for some reason. Also, mae sure that the visual cues are obstructed and entirely difficult to follow with bad camera angles and full character models blocking the playfield.

KickBeat is shitty and I didn't need to play it more than 15 minutes to realize that was $7 wasted.

KickBeat is the Guitar Hero version of fighting games. And it's a hectic one, let me tell you. There are 2 storylines to tell, but if you played through one of these stories you've heard all of the music so the second one isn't as much fun. But the story is genuinely funny and the music is pretty good, even if it's not what I normally listen to.

So you'll be fighting off enemies while music is playing, and with every produced beat you have to press a button, or multiple buttons, Do it right, and you'll create a nice combo resulting in more points, but fail and you'll get the mininum amount of points.

The music is up tempo so if you mess up once it will occasionally take several seconds to focus and recover, even if you're completely focused. Thankfully, there are power-ups to be earned and you'll need them to survive. If your health drops to 0, you have to start all over. Use power-ups to regain health, score more points or create a shield.

Playing on 'normal' anyone can complete the game, and it will take a lot of skill to complete these on higher difficulties. Especially the last boss fight had a big difficulty spike. Good luck with that ! So if you're the competitive type, this might just be for you.

Kickbeat is an enjoyable game that's absolutely worth it. But play it with a controller and save yourself some frustration. Just a friendly word of advice.

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Love this game a lot. Mixing music with martial arts is very fun. The only thing I didn’t like much is that Mei story has the same stages and song than Lee. Wish they could have done something different. Still…great game.

A unique spin on the game genre that brought you Dance Dance Revolution, Flash Flash Revolution and Boom Boom Rocket; Kickbeat is enjoyable if not just for the music. Originally released on the PS Vita and PS3: Zen Studios has released Kickbeat on Steam.

This is not your typical music & rhythm game where you are following arrows across the screen. It is action packed and fast paced, using fighting sequences to illustrate your ability to have good timing while enjoying their music or yours!

While the story line is a bit of a weak front for all the action, the soundtrack they picked for this game is phenomenal. With artists such as Env, Blue Stahli and Rob Zombie, Kickbeat quickly immerses you into the rhythm. Now Zen Studios just needs to release a game soundtrack.

It is a major plus to add your own music to play along with. However I found it difficult to use the timer to get the beat down to give the game the same flow as the built in music. This is where the community comes in on the Zen Studios forums. Many players are posting the settings for some of the songs they’ve played. While your dusty copy of La Bouche might not find itself here, you can find popular titles such as Gentleman by Psy, Radioactive by Imagine Dragons and hundreds more.

One of the gems of Kickbeat are the ‘boss’ fights. They are presented in a unique and entertaining manner as they deviate from the fighting humanoid npc’s. This can really mess up your timing if you are graphically inclined. However, kicking rockets off a helipad while overlooking the city, listening to Rob Zombie, is rather enjoyable.

If you enjoy music and rhythm games I highly recommend picking up Kickbeat on Steam.

Kickbeat is a lot of fun, with decent replayability. A nice tracklist too. A good amount of techno, industrial, and metal.

Using a keyboard, I've 5 starred all songs on normal and most on hard, but once you get into expert mode this game becomes hard as hell. I also played with a keyboard that did not like when I hit three buttons (arrow keys, specifically. It accepted 3 button input with WASD keys.)

It would have been nice to have a new tracklist for the second character, Mei, rather than just replaying the same exact songs again.

It's cool, however, to be able to see everything that's actually happening on the screen, unlike rhythm games such as Guitar Hero or Rock Band, where you are too focused on the song most of the time to be able to pay attention to what's going on in the background. I found myself getting really into some of the songs because it was fun to watch your character to do kung-fu to industrial metal.

I have not tried the beatmaker. Didn't really want to make the time. It'd be awesome if Kickbeat went the Audiosurf route and generated a match by pre-analyzing the selected track for beat, pace, etc.

My only major gripe with the game is when there are a lot of enemies on screen, it is EXTREMELY hard to tell where the they (mainly the blue dudes) are going to hit you next. The 4 colored buttons became blocked on occasion, and even if for a split second, it killed my huge combos. They can be turned off under settings, but I don't recommend this on higher difficulties unless you're confident enough to be able to follow the beat perfectly and you have the reflexes of a cat on meth.

Overall, Kickbeat is a ton of fun, it's eye candy, and it's well worth the $10.

This is a game that is both annoying and pretty fun.
I'll try to explain the gameplay mechanics briefly:
This is a rhythm game with 4 buttons. The enemies attack from 4 different directions and you have to press the same button where the attacker comes from. For example, enemy comes from up so you'll press up. You can tell which button to press in advance because the next attacker is glowing white. The enemies attacks are in sync with the music and there a total of 3 different enemy types.

The button presses feels good and there's no problem there. But what annoys me is that there's sometimes so much light effects in the background so it can disturb your visual feed so much so that it's really hard to see the next attacker. The white glow of the enemy sometimes blends in with the bright background too. That makes it feel unfair because it's really really hard to get a perfect on the first few runs. Sometimes even a enemy flies to the screen for a brief second covering about 30% of the screen. It's a very brief second but still a distraction.

Second thing that annoys me is the inconsistency when the glowing white appears on enemies. For example: when a attacker starts coming, the white glow appears 2-3 seconds before the attack. And after his attack, the next attacker comes right after him and the white glow appears right before his attack. This made me press buttons early because I saw a white glow lighting up so I thought a attack comes right then. When the attack comes right after the previous attack, there's sometimes very little time to react to it.

The game requires almost your full attention and the learning curve is high, but it can be really enjoyable. You'll start jamming if a familiar song starts playing and you'll get great satisfaction when you finally beat a difficult song.
I just feel that if there would have been less effects and the white glow on enemies would have been highlighted more, this game would feel more fair to play and much more fun.
The game is worth it's price tag and the gameplay mechanics are great. On a scale of 1-10, I'll give this 6/10.

Video example of how the white glow of the enemies can be hard to see: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d1hOAaIfpBE

To those who are not aware, music based games have moved on from Guitar Hero/Rockband clones, and have taken aspects from loads of different games, adding rhythm based mechanics over these. For PC gamers, this pot is starting to fill nicely, with games such as Audiosurf and Beat Hazard, who take ideas from old games like Asteroids and Wipeout. Kickbeat combines two genres that haven’t really had the same success as the earlier examples; the Music Fighting genre.

In its simplest terms, Kickbeat requires you to hit 4 buttons in rhythm to generic ninja soldiers coming towards you, all of which is in time to a piece of music. The variety in enemies is pretty poor, but as a game with 4 buttons, it would be difficult to see how they could improve this without changing mechanics.

The story mode of music games is often non-existent; look at the BIT.TRIP games, and tell me that any discernible story is given. Kickbeat tries to remedy this with a set of licensed tracks that come with the game, by artists like Pendulum and Marilyn Manson. Even with their best efforts, the story is just a thin film over the “complete these five tracks to unlock some more” system.

From the perspective of Kickbeat being a fighting game… you’re gonna be disappointed. The game’s mechanics are the same as you will find in DDR, or any other dance mat game. The true fun you’ll find in Kickbeat comes from the fact that you can “fight” to your own tracks.

Yup. In the same vain as many of these music based games, due to not everyone having the same taste in tracks, you can import your own music into the game, and play the same way you can with the included tracks; although it takes a bit of setting up. Unfortunately, there seems to be effectively no detection algorithm used in Kickbeat to find BPM, or track intensity, instead relying on the “tap a button to the beat of the track” before you can play. Due to the game requiring lots of accuracy, it is incredibly annoying when the game is offsetting every beat by a fraction of a second compared to the music you’re hearing. The scale used to change when each beat happens is arbitrary, meaning you’re really using trial and error to see if the two tracks line up.

Kickbeat Promo 3So far it seems that all I’ve said has been pessimistic, but this game’s real quality comes from how, when you’ve spent your time making sure the game matches up sound and visuals, and you’ve learned all the small annoying traits each mechanic has, and you find yourself in a sort of “zone” the game feels great, the music matches the dynamics of the enemies perfectly, and you can just play and play for hours on end…
Until you try playing it on anything other than the lowest difficulty.

The way the game shows you which button you should press is confusing as hell for the first few levels. The enemies circle around you for a few beats before attacking you, when you need to counter them. This means that you need to remember which order they entered your “inner circle” and how long ago that was, to counter them perfectly. When you try playing on harder difficulties, this becomes nigh on impossible, especially as you have to sometimes hit three buttons simultaneously, or take 3 hits on your health.

I’m not the best at fighting games, or precision rhythm games, but I’d say from the perspective of the average gamer, Kickbeat is a hassle to set up, has no useful story mode, and no multiplayer function.
Yet despite all this, I love it. Kickbeat has made me reach into my music library, and find some hidden gems that match the aesthetic perfectly. The game is effectively never ending, as any music you can play on your PC, you can play on your screen.

Rating: 7/10 - A huge amount of fun, if you’re happy to have an almost finished rhythm game, and have a LARGE library to play through.

If you're reading this you might be wondering: "What the hell is a Kickbeat?"

Kickbeat is a rythym game where you press keys, timed with the music, so your character kicks people in the face.

I like to call these games (FFR, Stepmania 1,2, Beatmanina) tap rythym games. Because there's no instrument or dance pad. It's meant to be played with a controller or keyboard.

I personally had been waiting for a game like this to come around for a long time, that is to say, a tap rythym game where there's something more interesting to look at than just arrows flying by the screen.

The production value feels very high to me for a $9.99 out of the gate priced game, it's really a big treat. It looks great, it sounds great, it plays tight and its got an interesting well written and well voiced storyline that plays out twice through the songs. It's got difficulty settings and customization options that allow you to jump right in but still eventually take off your training wheels as you go for huge scores on mind bendingly tough difficulties for rankings on the leaderboards, and achivements that actually mean something.

The playlist is 24 "get-your-blood-pumping" high b.p.m. songs ranging from Rap to Eletro to Nu Metal. Every single song is enjoyable and fun to play, there isn't a single one that I want to skip over and many that I want to play again and again.

While this isn't nessicarily a game for every rythym gamer out there, with its low cost and realitively easy learning curve, I recommend picking it up if your interest is sparkked at all. Is it hardcore? Yes. Will it probably make you frustrated? Yes. Will you continue to come back to play more and more eventually mastering each song and having a huge feeling of accomplishment? Most certainly yes.

It's an interesting idea that feels incomplete. This is a standard push the buttons with the music rhythm game. instead of the note highway or scrolling indicators this title uses a radial format combined with a fighting game aesthetic. Fighters enter the combat zone and rotate around you until moving to strike from one of the four cardinal directions and you press the corisponding button to stop them. There are 3 enemy types, denoted by color, which indicate on or off beat and multi button attacks. That's all there is though, just press buttons with the beat. It can get quite challenging at the higher settings, but not in a enjoyable way, the complexity never evolves. You are able to import your own music into the game allowing for some customizable fun. The core soundtrack is a bit 10 years ago, and the story is a bit of goofy fun. For the asking price of $10 I feel like it's not a bad deal if you are looking for a simple rhythm game with a fun aesthetic. It does not stack up to the greats in this genre, so buyer beware.