The magical charm of Grand cobra As light entertainment is it’s fully aware of what it is: garbage. Its sunset beach pass with Saved by The Bellfueled by a one-note parody of Johnny Lawrence stuck in the ’80s. For anyone old enough to remember the original karate boy film, has a back-to-back attraction to cheesy amateur theater and a cyclical plot, using the lore of the original films and their rivalry to create a fun snacking session.
Cobra Kai 2: Dojo Rises loosely adheres to the show’s position at the time of writing, which is currently in its fifth season. With an overarching original storyline, you can make your way through all three dojos — Cobra Kai, Miyagi-Do, and Eagle Fang — and control their related characters in pursuit of different goals. Additionally, many of the characters are voiced by the show’s actors, bringing authenticity to this brawler’s world.
In most cases, you can swap between multiple characters at once, giving you extra health bars in battle. It only takes half an hour before you assemble a strong four-man team through recruiting, making it easy to survive battles with multiple enemies. However, there is not much difference in fighting style, with almost all characters using the same basic set of commands. These include combo hits with the ‘Y’ button, with a press and hold to unleash a heavier attack; dodge, should be used almost constantly; and super attack is done by holding ‘ZR’, consuming your Chi Meter. There’s also a grab-and-go option with shoulder buttons that allows you to hold enemies, knock them down or, at some clearly outlined stabs, hurl them at landscape subjects. New skills can be acquired through collecting coins and specific items, and there’s a parkour-related point, allowing you to break through walls and expand certain boundaries to find Find hidden items.
The initial training starts off well enough, giving you a brief introduction to the moveset, before choosing a mission from the map overview. A bit like the show, this isn’t a game you’ll play for the plot, though you do count for winning the All Valley Karate Tournament in the end. The recruiting idea is good, as the show tends to focus on this theme from season to season, and the standard fight is sometimes broken down with weird mini-games like human bowling, whereby You smash enemies to take down a swarm standing still behind.
In addition to Story Mode is Cobra Classics, which allows you to engage in skirmishes that mirror the main battles in the show, including Season Two’s school battles. However, they’re not as cinematic as they could be, feeling fragmented, confusing, and forcing you to switch between different characters. You can also jump right into the All Valley Tournament, where almost all the characters are unlocked. Here, two-player local or online match-up options are available, and the off-limits habit-mimicking rules are included in the program. All characters have some kind of unique special move, from flying circle kicks to jabs in the eye. It operates in 360-degree 3D and offers little tactical strategy other than proper containment.
Sounds good so far? Sadly, Cobra Kai 2: Dojos Rising is pitifully underperforming: a perfectly fine concept that’s shockingly broken. Unlike its predecessor, Cobra Kai: The Karate Kid Saga continues, which works on the 2D plane and relative simplicity of combat, the sequel plunges you into a 3D arena-like space, where multiple attackers rush at you from all sides, bombarding you repeatedly without Just a little time to rest. This would be fine if the game was well programmed, allowing you to focus combos on one enemy before moving on to the next, but it’s such a horrible mess that there’s hardly any any structure for it. We can’t comment on how it runs on Steam, but the Switch version is terrible. It’s hard to see what’s happening or keep an eye on your opponent, with much of the fighting tied up with grabbing the camera. Trying to angle the scene so that you are not obscured and can see what is going on around you is an urgent task. The collision detection is smooth and without transitions, lacking energy and punch in the animations and sound effects. The fights are messy, confusing when you repeatedly hit the dodge button to try to focus on yourself and it is difficult to decipher the range or holes to attack.
Other than that, the frame rates are absolutely horrible, get crushed all over the place, and often completely freeze for a few seconds at a time — all inexplicable considering the low graphics quality. It wobbles and stops whether or not there are enemies on the screen, and it’s full of bugs and glitches. At one point, we swapped places with a teammate waiting nearby, only to have the same character suddenly appear on screen twice, side by side. The background parts are terrible, don’t work or stick to oddities, and there’s even a slowdown when interrupting the sliding visual story.
Fighting is frustrating, minigames are horribly conceived, and the whole time one can’t help but wonder how the finished product was released in such a state. Of course, it’s possible that many of these issues will be patched over time. But even then, the game isn’t good enough to recommend to fans of the genre.
However, can it be recommended to Cobra Kai fans? Not really. If you’re a go-getter who lives and breathes it like nothing else, you might be drawn to the attention to the same characters (although the model isn’t really that great), the theme and plot, music and vibe. But working with it was tough for all the wrong reasons, knowing that each new location introduces the same camera problems and it’s hard to fight the confusion. Well, eventually you will improve and overcome existing shortcomings, be able to dodge and counterattack, react appropriately and only occasionally feel like throwing your Joy-Cons at the screen. But one needs to consider whether that small benefit is worth the substantial price tag.
Inference
There’s nothing wrong with Cobra Kai 2: Dojos Rising conceptually. An arena battle set in the small world of the dojo, shopping mall, school, and park of the TV show with the theme of recruiting a team on its way to a big tournament is fine and fine. But the quality is shockingly low and far worse than the Switch hardware is capable of. One could argue that being sloppy, confused, and trashy is a lot like the content of the show, but when we move the mediums to the realm of video games, that half-hearted act is not. is the right shot.
