DiveKick is an interesting little number developed by One True Game Studios, originally as something of a joke. The game made its way around to different conferences and ultimately won over a mighty following. A PC release was originally slated to be funded through Kickstarter but ultimately Iron Galaxy wound up footing the publishing bill and the game is now available for you on Steam and PSN.
If you’ve never heard of DiveKick before then it won’t take long to catch you up. You have two buttons at your disposal: Dive, and Kick. Pressing Dive will send your character sailing straight up into the air. Pressing Kick will bring them back down to earth with a mighty kick. If you press kick while standing on the ground your character will jump backwards. If you press both buttons at once you will perform your character’s special move which differs depending on if you are on the ground or in the air.
When you successfully land a kick you will instantly knock out your opponent. Knock them out five times and you win the match. Sounds easy right?
I use the phrase deceptively simple because this game almost cetainly began as an exercise in simplicity and then had a surprising amount of depth shoved into it. The characters all feel significantly different to control. Kung Pao feels very floaty and her kick is delivered at a very wide angle. Conversely Mr. N can jump very high but his kick is practically angled straight down. There are much trickier characters available to you though. Uncle Sensei, for example, has a relatively floaty wide angle kick and a nice fast low angle one and he alternates between the two with each successive kick.
Your play can further be modified by selecting “gems” to correspond with your character. The gems can add 10% to your kicking, diving, or meter, or you can elect the dangerous “YOLO gem” which will grant you all three bonuses at the cost of only having one life left right at the start of the match.
DiveKick does have all the standard online trimmings. You can find both rooms to watch others fight as well as play standard Ranked and Player matches. You might feel like the game is largely luck and little skill but I’ll bet if you go play a few ranked matches online you’ll get schooled pretty hard like I was.
The release is a relatively bare bones one. You won’t find any hidden characters or interesting unlockables to work towards. The game does have trophy/achievement support but it’s all almost entirely linked to ranked online play. Story mode is also sparse, each character gets a short introduction, a couple dialogue moments mid-match, and then an equally short ending. The jokes are funny but humor aside there’s ultimately no reason to bother with the mode.
My biggest gripe is that the game does have mechanics worth learning, but they couldn’t even be bothered to include a training mode. If you want to familiarize yourself with each character before committing to a full story mode run or an online match you’ll have to dig out a second controller and set up your own versus matches.
Ultimately the game feels too devoid of content to recommend carte blanche. If you’re a big fan and want to get in on the online circuit it’s certainly worth the ten bucks but if you’re looking for a solid single player experience this isn’t it. I should add that if you have a group of ten friends and a bottle of whiskey this game is actually probably a 6/5, so adjust accordingly.
