Karate Survivor turns the entire world into your weapon
1.10.2025
By Ben Kuchera, Contributor
Karate Survivor turns your character's fists and feet into weapons, but that’s just the first thing to think about. Just like in the classic martial arts films that inspired its design, Karate Survivor asks you to use just about everything else as a weapon as well. The world is your playground, and the only rules are to survive. Making sure you see the opportunities around you at all times is the only way to succeed.
Don’t be afraid to start slow
Karate Survivor begins slowly, as many of your environmental abilities and attacks are locked when you begin. Think of your first few runs as training, as neither you nor the character you control understand how to best use the world around you.
You unlock new kicks, punches, and flips as you level up, and you can make those attacks even more powerful by connecting abilities of the same color or unlocking and arranging attacks so they're in numerical order. For the first few rounds, it’s best just to focus on learning how to take down the army of attackers trying to beat you down while figuring out how to stay out of range of their attacks.
You’ll begin unlocking the skills that open up the game’s world soon enough, and that’s when things really take off. I learned the basics in my first few runs and then I was ready to get a little more creative with my strategies.
Always know where you are, and what’s close
Once you’ve gotten a feel for the game and unlocked a few new abilities, you’ll see where the game’s fascination with ‘80s action films comes into play. Heroes are often outmatched and outnumbered in those stories, and have to think quickly to survive. Everything in the scene could be a weapon; if the fight took place in a kitchen, you should expect to see someone throwing plates. Fighting in a bathroom? There are all sorts of funny things that can happen with a plunger.
The choreography of the era is filled with fun, unexpected use of all kinds of props or just the layout of each room that brings so much joy to those films. It isn't always about being serious, it's about finding new and fun new ways for a group of people to fight onscreen. Excitement, surprise and delight are valued over brutality, even if the stunts are often being performed for real. The bodies of the actors may have been beaten up, but the films themselves make everyone look like heroic underdogs who use every tool at their disposal to overcome overwhelming odds.
Karate Survivor requires the same attention to everything around you. The more you play and the better you become, the more aspects of the environment will be freed up to use as a weapon. You can jump into a nearby chair and spin to the left, right, up, or down to attack crowds of enemies. Use poles to vault from rooftop to rooftop, staying mobile and harder to hit. Doors can be swung over to slam into anyone who is attacking you. Can you use that plank over there as a seesaw to knock out a bunch of bad guys? Of course you can. Every level introduces new objects you can pick up, ride on, slam into, or interact with to turn the tide of battle.
This detail changes how you have to look at the level around you as you play. While Vampire Survivors keeps the focus tightly on your character and the enemies you have to destroy so you don’t often have to worry about where you’re going, Karate Survivor constantly asks you to scan the entire screen to see how you can escape if you’re overwhelmed, or what you can grab to destroy a large number of baddies if you find yourself on the receiving end of a beating.
There is almost always a way out: something to use, a wall to run up and backflip off of to clear yourself some space, whatever you need. The game truly opens up once you’ve unlocked a large number of environmental abilities, attacks, and movements. It takes a little while to get going, but finding the rhythm in your attacks, your weapons, items around you, and the level design itself is thrilling. I often found myself right on the edge of disaster, barely squeaking out a win by managing to grab something lethal when it mattered the most.
It’s one of the ways the game’s setting also sets up the action in the game. If games like Vampire Survivors were the original inspiration and the rest came from classic action films, it’s the action films that helped Karate Survivor forge its own path. And it’s that constant need to pay attention to what’s around you, and determining how you can use it to survive, that helps make Karate Survivor such an unexpected treat.
Grab Karate Survivor now on Epic Games Store.