Kung-Fu Superstar: Kinect kick-'em-up hits Kickstarter

All I wanted from the Kinect when it was first announced was the ability to flying kick my telly and have an in-game avatar kick a demon in the face. As time passed, it became clear that the Kinect didn't have the latency or precision to quite deliver on that dream. Kung-Fu Superstar may well be the closest we'll come before someone invents the holodeck, or just a slightly better version of the Kinect. It casts you as a martial arts stuntman who must prove himself in ever more ambitious action scenes by pretending to kick stuntmen to death with moves lifted from real martial arts.

Fight scenes can unfold according to a the director's script, which looks like a Simon says exercise in which Simon demands a kick to the cranium every few seconds. The free-form modes have fights unfold more unpredictably. As you level up your stuntman, you can choose to favour certain styles, which will reflect the moves he can deploy contextually in fight scenes. If you don't have, or care to have, a Kinect camera, the devs are also aiming to support control pads and even the Oculus Rift headset, when that eventually comes out.

"It's been just over a year since we left our jobs and started working on Kung Fu Superstar full time. Since then we have been living off our savings. Absolutely everything you have seen and will see in our videos, we have accomplished with zero funding," say the devs. They're now asking for £200,000 to bring the project to fruition. The Kickstarter page has a video explaining their game, with appearances from a number of Kung-Fu experts. And Peter Molyneux. Here it is.

Part of the UK team, Tom was with PC Gamer at the very beginning of the website's launch—first as a news writer, and then as online editor until his departure in 2020. His specialties are strategy games, action RPGs, hack ‘n slash games, digital card games… basically anything that he can fit on a hard drive. His final boss form is Deckard Cain.