Rag Doll Fung Fu Review

The first time I heard of RDKF, was when I logged into Steam one night for a long night of Counter-Strike. I didn’t pay much attention to the pop-up at first, and just figured it was a mod that I was not interested in. After seeing the pop-up again, I looked a little deeper. Wow, this isn’t a mod.. it’s a completely odd game. At first thought, it reminded me of the stand-alone game, Codename Gordon, which is also available on Steam.

If it’s on Steam though, it must be based on the Source engine, right? Wrong. The game engine was written from scratch by Mark, with some tweaking help from friends. The reason we are seeing it advertised through Steam, is because this is how Mark decided to distribute the game. This is a smart move, because it’s one less thing a developer has to worry about.. plus it’s secure.

Rag Doll Kung Fu has been in the making for over a year, and it’s clear that Mark has put a ton of Chi power into this game. He worked on it a lot in his spare time, many evenings and weekends. This game is so home grown, that everything you see was created by either Mark or a close friend… even the music and movies!

The basic view of the game is this. Imagine having a Kung Fu fight with string puppets, but with no strings! What’s interesting, is that you can play through the entire game without touching the keyboard. That’s right, 100% mouse. This means you could play the game at work and your boss may actually think you are busting your behind off for the company. Awesome stuff!

Moving your character is something that takes so time to get used to. You have to grab ahold of a limb, whether it be his hands, feet or ever his head. You can simply click and drag your Chi along, to get to your destination. To jump, you just grab a limb and build a little power and quickly jolt your mouse to the area that you need to jump to.

Kung Fu wouldn’t make much sense without fighting, so there is a lot of that in the game. Fighting is pretty easy, as long as you already have a hold of moving your character. To punch another character in the face, for example, you can grab your Chi’s hand, and drag a right-click towards your opponents face.