Kung Fu Panda: Legendary Warriors – NDS – Review

Kung-Fu Panda was one of the biggest
movies of this past summer, and was pretty well-received by critics. The Kung-Fu
Panda game came out around the same time, and while it’s not going to replace
GoldenEye as best movie/game adaptation ever, it was a perfectly decent little
action/platformer that kept enough of the fun and spirit of the movie to
entertain the film’s pre-teen audience. But now, just five months later
Activision has released another Kung-Fu Panda game, Legendary Warriors, set to
accompany the film’s DVD release (not to mention the lucrative Christmas
season). And while Legendary Warriors isn’t an exact clone of the previous game,
the changes they’ve made aren’t really for the better.

Legendary Warriors starts off after
the events of the movie, with peace returned to the Valley of, well, Peace. It’s
all thanks to Po the Panda, who managed to defeat the evil Tai Lung with the
assistance of Kung-Fu masters the Furious Five. Except guess what? Tai Lung
isn’t quite as defeated as you might think, as he returns and kidnaps the
Furious Five (well, four of them anyway). It’s up to Po and Tigress to locate
and defeat Tai Lung to rescue their captured friends. The game’s story is about
as simple as it could be, pretty much just “Hey, remember what happened in the
movie? It’s happened again!” This was the first indication that the game might
not be much more than a simple cash-in, a quick attempt on Activision’s part to
get Kung-Fu Panda fans (or more accurately, Kung-Fu Panda fans’ parents) to buy
another game version.

Gameplay pretty much proved that
suspicion right. The original game borrowed the structure of the recent
Castlevania titles, where you explore each area to find new powers, which grant
access to new areas. Legendary Warriors scraps this design in favor of a more
straightforward level-based action game design. While the first game’s gameplay
was in 2D, here you explore each stage in limited 3D (like the old Crash
Bandicoot games — you can move in 3D, but each level is more like a path than
wide-open). The fighting action is more straightforward, too — instead of
drawing slashes on the touch screen to activate your various attacks, simple
button presses are chained together into combos. In many ways, Legendary
Warriors resembles a cut-down version of the console KFP game, rather than the
previous DS installment. Which would be fine, if the game was fun to play.

 
The game’s few enemy models repeat
throughout the experience.

Which, sad to say, it is not. The
fighting mechanics are too simple to be interesting or entertaining, and
fighting is pretty much all you do. Sure, the fact that you can choose to play
as Po or Tigress (each with their own set of levels) is nice, but aside from a
few unique moves each, the game’s pretty much the same regardless of which
character you pick. You’ll follow each stage’s path, fighting assorted bad guys
as you go, until you get to a spot where walls spring up around you and you have
to fight either a group of weak enemies or one large enemy before you’re allowed
to go on. It’s a simple formula that’s repeated throughout the game, long after
it’s gotten old.

 
Every so often you’ll face off against a
big sub-boss, but they’re not really that threatening.

There are other little elements to
the gameplay, but nothing that really makes that big an impact. There are some
slight platforming elements at times, but the platforming isn’t challenging or
involved enough to really keep your attention; it seems like the developers
added the jumping sequences just to break up the monotony, with little regard
for creating fun platforming areas. They’ve also included some touch-screen
elements, like using the stylus to set ropes swinging or activate in-game
mechanisms, but this feels pretty tacked-on. You can also activate powerful Chi
attacks by tracing symbols onscreen, but to do so you’ve got to take your hand
off the attack buttons. This wasn’t very well thought-through, because any enemy
who’s tough enough to require you to use your Chi attacks is going to be killing
you while you’re busy drawing on the screen — usually it’s just faster and more
effective to use your regular attacks.

The game has a decent 3D engine
(well, decent by DS standards, anyway), so all your favorite characters and
locales are recognizable and look pretty good. The stages are pretty empty,
though, with few objects or elements outside of walls to distinguish each area.
The characters animate well enough, and some of Po’s animations do a good job of
conveying a sense of weight and clumsiness to the character (Tigress movements,
on the other hand are smooth and agile). The music’s about what you’d expect and
nothing more, so be prepared for nondescript Asian tunes.

 
The fights look decent, but not that
exciting.

Kung-Fu Panda: Legendary Warriors
isn’t a bad game; none of the game’s elements are particularly poorly done, and
I could see a kid having fun beating up animals in the game’s world. But the
fact of the matter is that there’s already a superior Kung-Fu Panda game
available for the DS. In light of this, I can’t really recommend Legendary
Warriors to anyone but the film’s biggest fans.

Gameplay: 6.5
There’s some competent-enough brawling action in the game, but it’s nothing you
haven’t seen or done a hundred times before. Punching and kicking your way
through hundreds of evil kung-fu animals might sound like a good time, but it
gets old real quick.

Graphics: 6.8
The 3D here isn’t bad by DS standards, but it doesn’t impress either. Each
character looks and moves like their film counterpart, but environments are
usually empty paths, and enemy models have little detail and repeat far too
often. The fighting isn’t bad to look at, but it’s never really visually
exciting, either.

Sound: 6.2
Unremarkable Chinese-style songs are the order of the day here — they’re not
bad, but you won’t remember them even seconds after finishing the stage. Sound
effects are what you’re really listening to most of the time, and they consist
of various moans, screams, and beating sounds. If you play with the volume all
the way down, you’re not missing anything.

Difficulty: Easy
You can button-mash your way through pretty easily. Some of the boss characters
have cheap attacks that can deal lots of damage quickly, but you can heal
yourself at any time, so you have to really not be paying attention to die.

Concept: 5.6
An overweight panda doing martial arts is a decent idea for a movie or a game,
but it’s been done at this point. Being able to switch characters is kinda nice,
but it’s hardly the kind of innovation that deserves its own game.

Overall: 6.4
Kung-Fu Panda, the movie and the game, were successes — but to release another
game this soon after the original’s release just seems greedy. If Kung-Fu Panda
is your absolute favorite movie and you’ve already memorized the first game,
you’ll probably want to play this. Otherwise, Legendary Warriors isn’t worthy of
your time or money.