Kick and move forward — that's the whole philosophy of KickMaster. There's nothing complex about it, but that's exactly where the magic lies in its raw simplicity. It's one of those NES titles that crawled out of the indie scene in today's age, when individual creators are playing with eight-bit like it's building blocks.

KickMaster is a very straightforward beat-em-up where everything revolves around your legs. Your character moves through alternating stages, kicking everything alive and dead along the way, collecting items and progressing forward. Story? None. Plot? Zero. It's as if someone took the basic essence of nineties arcade and said: let's create the purest possible form of it.

Playing comes down to a simple recipe: movement, kicks, sometimes jumps. You hold the button down constantly because that's how you move fastest. New techniques unlock gradually — different types of kicks, the ability to jump higher, or create energy waves with your legs. In the end, that's the only thing the game develops. Without these upgrades you'd be in trouble, because the difficulty ramps up and you'd get stuck on the fourth stage without them.

Unlike classic NES beat-em-ups like Double Dragon, there's no co-op and no strategy here. It's pure mechanical grind — kick away, collect hearts for health, kick away. The music plays in the background so quietly you barely notice it. The graphics are colorful but unnecessarily chaotic, so sometimes you can't even tell where the threat is coming from.

At its core, KickMaster is a game that would've ended up as "one arcade run and I forgot about it at home" back in the eighties. These days it's a curiosity for retro connoisseurs who want to see every variation on the theme. It's not a badly made game, just a title without personality — no story, no character, nothing to pull you forward.

If you're in the mood for ultra-simple physical action without frills and with minimal story, you won't regret firing up KickMaster in an emulator. You'll play it for fifteen minutes, see what it's got, and remember it mostly as a curious proof of how indie creators today mess around with the limitations of old consoles.