Reviews
Review by apenao on 02 Sep 2009 (Rating: 5)
The best martial arts simulator (imho) for the Spectrum. Still very playable and funny.
Review by p13z on 26 Sep 2009 (Rating: 5)
Out in the earlier days of the Spectrum, and remained the best martial arts game. Single player was very good, and two player is awesome. Personally, I returned again and again to this game right up until IKplus came out for the ST and AMIGA.
A good karate game which had many moves and kept my friends and I entertained for hours.
Nice colourful screens and neat graphics too but the game was just too slow to be really good.
Very good for it's time though and was a bit of a ground breaker at the time.
Review by dandyboy on 09 Jul 2011 (Rating: 5)
One of the best martial arts simulators I have ever played !! smooth movements and a great variety of strikes ... great game !! fine memories .
1985 Melbourne House (UK)
by Gregg Barnett, Steven Taylor, Greg Holland and William Tang
I can still remember the day I first played this game. I had to turn the computer off after only playing it a couple of times because me and my mom were going to my granny's house. I was so anxious in playing it I spent all afternoon drawing kung fu and karate sketches, a whole notebook of it.
An all time Spectrum classic.
Review by Stack on 04 Jul 2013 (Rating: 5)
I got my kicks out of it.
Lovely clean graphics and a great moves, all smoothly animated. Stylishly rendered with a better graduated computer AI than we could have expected.
Top dan.
Despite the misleading title, there are no exploding body parts to be found in this game. Once this bombshell has sunk in, you'll find a solid one on one fighter.
Review by YOR on 19 Jan 2014 (Rating: 4)
Though I found this a little too tough at times I do agree that this was a great fighting game. At the time it was simply a league ahead of the rest and it's still a good way to pass time by. I prefer this game to IK+.
It probably remains the best one-on-one beat'em up on the Speccy, nice under every aspect: playability, complexity, graphics and sound.
One of the Spectrum classics. A great karate game by Melbourne House with sixteen different movements: kicks, jumps, punches, somersaults, sweeps, ...
It includes the proper sounds and good and detailed backgrounds. The movements and actions of the characters are very well done. The scoring system with the use of the yin-yan symbols are very original.
In spite of finding it easy to play and progress after some games, it's one of the best fighting games for the Spectrum. Unforgettable combat-intro music.
Review by Darko on 24 Feb 2019 (Rating: 5)
A superb fighting game. Very few have come close to its brilliance since. A must for Spectrum enthusiasts.
Review by pet1 on 03 Aug 2020 (Rating: 5)
Probably the best artial marts game ever
.
It was able to put a true Milestone not only in the genre, but in the whole Softpedia.
"Exploding Fist" as we called it, was a favorite of the time (1985,86, even 87...).
Two simultaneous players!
Nowadays you can play it very well in emulators.
Even there's not much to envy Tekken or whatever!
