Karate Survivor will have you kicking, punching, rolling over tables and throwing chairs at people

Continuing my quest to play every survivor-like there is, Karate Survivor is the latest I've been kicking and punching through and it's great and surprisingly different to the rest of the crop. Note: key provided by Vicarious PR.

This one is like playing through a camp 80s martial arts movie, only in a Vampire Survivors-like form. In fact, I got a little Streets of Rage vibe from this one too, I could have seen this on my shelf next to it in the days of the Sega Mega Drive. It has the usual marks of a survivor-like with auto-attacks, lots of enemies swarming you and various upgrades to build up a crazy character as you go.

However, compared to a lot of the survivor-likes, this genuinely does do plenty differently. For starters, it is of course melee focused, it's all about getting up close and personal.

There's also no specific weapon or ability timers. Instead, you have a character timer. You wait for it to tick down each time, and then it goes through a timeline of moves you've stacked and upgraded after each level-up. You can switch these abilities around in the timeline, and build up combo moves matching colour types to truly kick some ass as you run around. That alone is rather unique in the space, and quite challenging to be in the right position when the timeline is running through so you actually hit everyone. And thanks to that, each run can end up very differently.

There's also weapons spread around the maps like brooms, lamps and plenty more to grab and do some quick smashing over enemies heads. Weapons only have limited uses though as they'll break after only a few hits leaving you once again to spin those arms around. There's even funny special moves at times when you pick up certain objects, like a diving flying kick that will smash a big area after you select the direction.

Release trailer:

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I really love the map destruction too. As you fight you'll be smashing various parts of the map apart too. It doesn't feel quite as static and lifeless as a lot of similar games in the genre as you'll actually be using a lot of things placed around each map.

During your run through you'll be collecting teeth (hah!), which is your currency for permanent unlocks to boost your character properly with the usual suspects like more damage. What I also enjoyed about this is that as you progress more through it, you'll also unlock more general abilities like rolling over obstacles, kicking objects at people, accessing new areas and a lot more. It sprinkles it all in somewhat quickly too, as long as you do enough during a run and so even after an hour of gameplay you'll have an increasing amount of fun with it.

Played on Linux with the latest Proton 9.0-3 it works great. Really fun on Steam Deck too, although the performance can at times drop just a bit, it's always over 40FPS in my testing and largely around 60FPS. There's no Steam Deck rating for it yet but the developer noted in an announcement they were directly testing and optimising for it.

Really good fun, unique and worth jumping into for sure. It's strangely somewhere between a beat 'em up and a survivor-like that captivated me. I just wish your character was just a little bit speedier to begin with, but a minor point. Overall it's an easy recommendation.