Great idea, average execution
Written: Feb 25 '01
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Soundtrack, good cheesy kung-fu 'atmosphere', lots of secret stuff
Cons: Very shallow fighting system, 'repetitive' characters
The Bottom Line: Give me Soul Calibur, Tekken 3, Real Bout Fatal Fury 2, or King of Fighters 99 any time over this. It's not bad, but not extraordinary.
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| churst's Full Review: Wu Tang Shaolin Style for PlayStation 1 |
If you're a long-time fan of The Wu-Tang Clan, then you've probably grown to view your devotion to the group as a blessing and a curse. Almost every one of their albums is worth buying, and yet every album seems to be filled with some brilliant songs, and some terrible ones.
So I guess it's only fitting that the Playstation fighting game, Wu-Tang: Shaolin Style, fits this "sometimes great, sometimes dull" pattern. This game succeeds very well on a few levels, such as the plot (which is so appropriately cheesy that you can't tell if they're paying homage to old-school kung-fu flicks, or mocking them), the secrets (I can only assume there's a ton of them, because I've been playing this for a while and still haven't come close to unlocking them all), and the whole "look" of the fighting, which does a better job of imitating the martial arts flicks of old than most fighting games do.
The gameplay, however, is not that great. I am a Neo Geo fanatic, and I've also devoted countless hours towards wasting away in front of a TV screen while duking it out in Tekken 3 and Soul Calibur matches, so I can think of a lot of games which, in a pure gameplay-sense, put W:SS to shame. It'll provide you with a fair amount of entertainment, but likely won't become one of your favorites. Add to this a pretty high difficulty factor, and the game gets downright frustrating.
The Plot
It is almost hilarious in its attempt to recreate the feel of a classic flick like "Five Deadly Venoms". You start out assuming the role of one of the nine members of The Wu-Tang Clan. Your master has been captured by one of his rivals, who wishes to learn the secrets of the Wu-Tang fighting styles, which he will then merge with his own to somehow become an invincible warrior (it is never really explained how this would work, but then again, doing so would detract from the kung-fu 'feel' of W:SS). So your goal is to rescue him.
Graphics
Since everything is in 3D, I guess I shouldn't expect this game to exhibit the liveliness of, say, King Of Fighters 99 when it comes to the graphics. I think the backgrounds are fairly drab, particularly in the urban New York stages. Maybe it's because I'm first and foremost a computer gamer, and I've suffered through countless hours of playing FPS games where you're wandering through a grey warehouse filled with brown crates, but I really wish they hadn't resorted to using that theme in W:SS at all. Oh well, it's nothing terrible, but it's not likely to rock your world, either.
The characters themselves also look pretty much average. The textures are pretty small (meaning, not many details are evident), and the models do not use many polygons. On the plus side, that ensures that the action remains very fast even with four players going at it simultaneously. But then again, it doesn't give any of the fighters 'personality'. Indeed, if you aren't a fan of the music group, then chances are you won't remember any of the fighters by name aside from GZA, who wields a pretty nifty blade attached to a chain (meant to imitate a microphone on a wire).
The good part about the graphics is the animation of the fighters. Due to the lack of spectacular, magical attacks that clutter every other fighting game imaginable, W:SS has that old-school kung-fu flick "look" down pat. The only other time I've seen a fighting game use the atmosphere of those films this accurately was in Mortal Kombat 1 (which, incidentally, was also a pretty average game at best). Indeed, there are times where my friends and I have had more fun just keeping W:SS in demo mode and watching the computer going at it, than I have by actually playing.
One final note about the graphics - the fatality animations are slightly better than Mortal Kombat 4's. They're good and gory, they aren't waaaaaaay-over-the-top like MK3's (remember that turkey-pretending-to-be-a-game, where a person's body would explode and about 15 skulls would drop down from the sky?!), and they try to contribute to the whole "feel" of the game...i.e., Inspectah Deck will use the Shaolin Finger Jab repeatedly to hit an enemy in several vital areas, then punch them so hard in the neck that he'll sever the head.
And if you don't want your kids seeing that kind of stuff, keep in mind that they have to enter a parental violence lock-out code to view the fatalities and spill blood and all of that.
Sound/Music
Well, of course I'm going to say that the soundtrack is incredible. There's a pretty short, but sweet, Masta Killa solo tune that I haven't heard on any Wu-Tang release to date. (And believe me, I've bought almost every single one, with my collection now exceeding 40 CDs.) (And yes, I know that I am insane and have no life.) (Quit laughing, already!) There also three instrumentals that aren't even official Wu-Tang songs - indeed, they're a little bit too techno-ish for me to believe that RZA or Tru Master or 4th Disciple produced them - but they're also pretty cool.
The sound effects are another high point, as they do a good job, again, of adding the over-blown sound effects of your favorite kung-fu flicks to the mix. And unlike most other fighting games, your character won't scream out the name of his special attack in an annoying voice when executing it. (Hey Sagat - get the hint?!)
Gameplay
Here's where I start yawning at times, or just getting frustrated and giving up. The multiplayer aspect of the game is pretty fun and hectic, but the singleplayer aspect is more frustratingly difficult than anything else. Add to this a very shallow fighting system, and you have a game that really doesn't have a lot of depth or staying power.
First, the programmers made a few decisions that I simply can't get used to concerning the basic controls. And before you say "well, that's just YOU, it's not the programmer's fault you can't get with the game", I'm going to say that I know many, many other players who don't like the control setup.
In most fighting games, pushing away from your opponent will move you away, unless they're performing an attack, in which case you'll block. In W:SS, you simply move back. You have to actually hold a button to block, just like Mortal Kombat. This gets frustrating because a lot of attacks that your character uses require at least two buttons, and having to have a finger on the block button at all times makes it very difficult to use the entire variety of attacks at your disposal.
In most fighting games, pushing up on the joystick will cause you to jump in the air. In W:SS, you'll move towards 'the background' (i.e. if your character is facing to the right, he'll take one step to his left, towards the background). Likewise, where normally pushing down on the joystick would cause you to crouch, in W:SS you'll move towards 'the foreground'. I couldn't find any use for moving towards the 'back' or 'front'...of course, that might be part of the reason why I have such a hard time playing the game., but then again, no one else I know can get used to it either. Soul Calibur allows you to do this very same thing without screwing up the basic joystick control that has held true for almost every fighting game ever made. It's not that I make the mistake of pushing up, in hopes of jumping, but it's just that I don't see the value in moving 'back' or 'front'.
Oh yeah, in order to crouch, you have to hold another button down. That makes many crouching attacks worthless.
There is one cool thing about this game that I wish other games would implement. Every fighting game, no matter the 'setting', uses the stupid "win two out of three rounds to win the match" garbage. Heck, the utterly idiotic and convoluted and horribly contrived storyline of Mortal Kombat revolves around somehow determing Earth's fate via a freaking martial arts tournament - just so that they could use this stupid "two out of three" system. Yeah, gods are fighting over the very existence of our planet, so of course they need to use a two-out-of-three rule! Makes perfect sense!
ARGH. If you ever hear someone ranting about how horrible fighting games are, I guarantee you, the two-out-of-three rule will be one of the reasons they think that way. And they're right, it is stupid and should be done away with. Thankfully, W:SS does exactly that. There are no 'rounds' here...you simply have to accomplish a particular scenario's objectives.
Not to say that W:SS avoids stupidity completely. The characters, both you and your opponents, are often given multiple 'lives'. This means that, if you have more than one life, and your opponent delivers a blow that depletes your current life bar completely, you're going to die, usually in a gruesome fashion (i.e. if you were bodyslammed, your body will freaking EXPLODE in a shower of limbs and blood)...but you'll come back to life wiht a replenished life bar, and one less 'life'. Very stupid - why didn't they just give some guys large 'life bars' than others?
One final note about the fighting system, it simply isn't very deep. At least, it sure isn't when compared to the Real Bout Fatal Fury or King of Fighters games. There's no dodging attacks. The 'power meter' is very simplistic - basically, it builds up over time, and when it's full, you do more damage...I don't think it unlocks special attacks or abilities. You can't break combos.
Now that I've gotten the basic gameplay out of the way, here's some details on the different modes. The singleplayer mode, where you have to perform special tasks in order to unlock 'chambers' (such as performing a five-hit combo, not getting hit by an attack for fifteen seconds, or winning a scenario without losing a bar of life), can be summed up as follows: unbelievably tough.
Some of the arch-enemy fighters are incredibly tough by themselves. Now imagine a battle where you have to take three of them on...simultaneously!!! That happens in this game. I have yet to win that battle, no matter which character I'm using, and same goes for my pals.
Some of the regular enemy fighters, unfortunately, are identical to some of the Wu-Tang Clan members in every way, except for their look. Not cool...it's the gaming equivalent of buying a Wu-Tang Clan CD and getting seven very good songs, and then seven worthless "filler" tracks to go along with it. You're gonna wonder where the creativity went at some point.
Some of the scenarios involve a few twists. One has you defending a fellow member of the Clan, who is incapacitated and cannot fight for himself. You have to prevent the enemies from killing him. There are a number of two-on-two battles, where you'll ally with a fellow Clan member against two baddies. Some have time-limits - i.e., you have to survive for a certain amount of time. It doesn't matter how many times you defeat your enemies, more will appear to replace them until you hit the time limit. It almost manages to add some depth to the gameplay.
But not enough for me. I've not unlocked all of the 36 chambers, nor will I ever do so, because I eventually stopped playing. When you take the fairly shallow fighting system, the very high difficulty, and the not-very-exciting characters all into account, you wind up with a pretty standard, average fighting game.
Overall
If you can get this game at a cheap price, then I would say do exactly that - get it. Since it's well over a year old now, I'm pretty sure you'll be able to land a copy for $15-20, which isn't too unreasonable in my book. It'll provide you with a fair amount of fun, and it comes as close to putting you in the shoes of a Chiang Sheng or Chen Kwan Tai as any fighting game to date. It does so thanks to its focus on recreating the look and feel of old-school kung-fu flicks like "The Massive" and "Five Deadly Venoms" and what-not.
But if you're like me, and have been raised on a constant diet of King of Fighters and Tekken, then you're going to ask yourself where all the gameplay is at. Not to mention that you're also going to repeatedly wonder why it is you are completely incapable of handling those freaking 3-on-1 matches against the computer. Sure, this game doesn't play like other fighting games, but unfortunately, this is kind of a curse, as the end result is something that's kind of repetitive, shallow, and extremely frustrating.
Basically, if you're a huge fan of the Wu-Tang Clan, and can get it for a low price, I would say go ahead and have some fun for a while. Otherwise, buyer beware.
Recommended:
Yes
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Epinions.com ID:
churst
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Member: Craig Hurst
Location: Indianapolis, IN
Reviews written: 98
Trusted by: 37 members
About Me:
"God is dead." - Nietzsche, 1883... "Nietzsche is dead." - God, 1900
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