Kung Fu Kid

The Good
Every stage in the game is rich in colour and decoratively patterned. A couple of those stages are mazes for more interesting platforming. If you’re good at jumping with those easy to grasp controls, you can practically breeze through a lot of the stages without losing much health. From beginning to end you hear those music tracks so well-composed in PSG, especially the oriental melody in Stage 4.

The Bad
The two-player mode is pretty pointless with its alternating between players. Having two kung fu kids fighting together at the same time is an exceptional must in games like this. What makes the gameplay unforgiving is the lack checkpoints, especially when you make it to the boss and die at that point.

The Bottom Line
This title may probably be Sega’s counterpart to the NES game The Karate Kid, but didn’t really spawn a promising franchise after that. Still it was a vast improvement over its predecessor Dragon Wang. This is a purely exclusive Master System title which retro Sega fans would greatly appreciate having. Too bad it didn’t get a Game Gear port, but I suppose you can’t have it all.