It impresses me that someone out there assembled a team of professional game designers, programmers, sound composers, video recorders and actresses to create a game like this in the year Two Thousand and Freaking Eleven. Furthermore, it impresses me that this is a sequel.

The best way I can describe Bikini Karate Babes 2: Warriors of Elysia is: it astonished me. I already knew it was going to be a terrible game, but the final product impressed me far beyond than that.

 

The game looks exactly like the good old FMV-heavy fighting games from the 90’s, like Mortal Kombat, Way of the Warrior and, gasp, Street Fighter: The Movie: The Game. Unlike previous games, of course, the game only features real-life ladies wearing very little “combat gear”. To think that they were filmed doing those fight moves, and worst of all, close combat grappling animations (including things like putting a girl in all fours and slapping her on the butt) is both hilarious and very concerning. This is the level of cheesy that was left behind after the mid 90s, when FMVs were all the rage and people thought it was ok to buy a game featuring nothing but a Marky Mark music video.

The music is very “mid-90s CD-based”-ish as well, for the lack of a better definition. There is a lot of 90s drum n bass, mixed with rock, mixed with MIDI tunes, y’know, the usual stuff that used to plague games for the Sega CD and the 3DO. So cheesy, so bad, so corny, so awesome.

Gameplay-wise, well, this game is something else. First of all, you cannot properly edit the controls through the game. If you’re not an expert on editing game XML file data, you’ll be stuck with the keyboard. Playing a fighting, on the keyboard. Whoopty freakin doo.

The controls are really something else. You use the arrow keys (ugh) to move your fighter, and use the 1, 2 and 3 buttons in the numeric keypad to attack. Someone told me you can perform combos and projectile attacks by doing the correct buttons combinations. I have no clue as I have never managed to perform anything with the controls other than mash the #1 key to the point of corroding its plastic, beating an entire Arcade Mode run while doing so.

While the controls are indeed terrible, you don’t have to worry about losing fights or anything like that, given the fact the A.I. resembles brain dead snails with perfection. If you set the game to “easy”, the opponent will simply stand still. It’s like a practice mode, but with actual cutscenes and the chance of actually unlocking new fighters afterwards. Yeah, you read it right, you can actually unlock characters by beating the main single-player mode. Take that, modern fighting games!

There’s also a multiplayer mode, in which, well, you have to share the keyboard with a friend, right next to you, side by side, as if you two were playing Pong in the 1970s. It might be a terrible gaming experience per se, but I was told the multiplayer gets a lot better after a few drinks.

So this is Warriors of Elysia. It’s juvenile, it’s depraved, it plays awfully, but it’s so absurdly pathetic that you should play it, at least once. Only then you’ll realize that someone made this in god damn 2011, sold it off Steam for more than 30 dollars (don’t pay for this, please) and thought it was a great idea. It is a game so, so, so unbelievably bad, it’s funny, and worth checking out.

There’s also a mode called “Spectacle”, in which all you do is pick two fighters and just watch them (cat)fight, leaving you free to do something else.

Get your mind off the gutter, I wasn’t saying that.