Karate Kid iPhone app kicks and misses

Karate Kid iPhone game (free) actually has so little to do with the movie it’s surprising. There’s an option to read a very brief synopsis of the upcoming film on the main screen, and when you see the Karate Kid himself, he bears some resemblance to Jaden Smith, but otherwise, this is basically just a free iPhone game with a few mini-game style competitions thrown together, and it feels that way.

There are five games to play, the best of which is a “Simon Says”-style game where you have to tilt or swipe across the iPhone screen depending on the given instruction. This apparently just goes on forever until you mess up, hence its title, “Endurance.” The rest of the games are either too easy like “Courage,” where you time an iPhone tilt in order to break wood and cement blocks, or just really frustrating and bad, like “Perseverance,” where you try to keep Jaden Smith from falling off a balance beam into water by tilting the iPhone.

Your combined scores from the five games are added up for a total score that then gives you a belt ranking similar to the rankings you’d achieve in a karate class. You can also earn achievements for various successes like “reaching 40,000 total points.”

Even for free, The Karate Kid is an iPhone game you could do without. Visually it’s so-so, and you can play your own music during the game, but this just isn’t very much fun.

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