Kung Fu Panda’s controls are manageable, but by no means ideal. The nunchuck is used to move around the screen and combination of various button presses and gesticulations are used for jumping and your multiple moves. It sounds fine until you get to actually doing it - a charged up smash like move requires the nunchuck to be pointed up whilst the remote is pointed down. By the time you’ve finished figuring out where your arms are supposed to be, you’ve been hit and your charge is lost. In the end, the easiest thing to do is simply press the B button for the speedy, light attack as much as possible and hope for the best. Thankfully the game’s combat isn’t any more difficult than trying to navigate its convoluted controls. Although the combat suffers as a result of the Wii's controllers the Quick Time Events are much better; rather than just hitting a button when it flashes on the screen, a timed swing of the remote is required, allowing you feel linked much more closely with the action.
The 3D brawler follows the story of Po, a panda who, when not thinking about his next meal, dreams of becoming a Kung Fu master. The narrative is pretty much in line with the film, taking us with Po through his journey to become the ‘Dragon Warrior’ to defending the world against the tyrannical Tai Lung. All the main characters are present and you’ll even get to take control of them at some points.
Despite it's flaws, there's plenty to love about Kung Fu Panda.
Although the real Jack Black – the voice of Po - is absent from the game, his sound-alike does a fairly good job of narrating the story and providing the odd bit of ingame voice-work every now and then. The comedic moments in the cutscenes are also helped by the actor’s delivery of some fairly funny lines. Overall though, the game's audio is pretty hit or miss - most of the music sounds great and sets the mood of the levels well, but other aspects of the audio fall flat on their faces. We never want to hear the sound of Po jumping ever again, and we’re sure that the thousands of parents that end up buying this game for their kids will feel the same way, especially after going through the couple of levels that require constant jumps to be made between lily pads floating on an expansive lake.
Collision detection is another area in which Kung Fu Panda struggles. Sometimes it feels as if Po is moving through jelly when he jumps (possibly it’s his tremendous panda belly weighing him down), but at times he can’t make what seems to be the simplest of gaps. We’re sure that we would have found the sounds he makes while leaping far less irritating if it hadn’t been linked to an event which punished us even when we felt were undeserving. At least during combat this doesn’t seem quite so bad and your blows generally feel as if they’ve hit your opponent.
For a game that has visuals torn directly from its PlayStation 2 counterpart and slapped on the Wii, Kung Fu Panda winds up looking reasonably decent. It’s not the best looking game on either of the two platforms, but for the most part it does a decent job of conveying the areas from the film. It would have been nice to have seen a little more detail though, as often the levels feel a little lifeless. One area where there are no real visual issues are the cutscenes, which not only look great but also really capture some of the comedy contained within the film.
See what we're saying about the collision detection?
The various locations also offer up quite a variety of gameplay styles. There’s missions in which you have to simply defeat enemies, one that has you preventing boars from stealing priceless vases, one that has you guiding a boat down a treacherous river, and the list goes on. This prevents what could very easily have become a tedious brawler from falling into the trap of repetition that many other movie tie-ins have.
Games based on kids movie franchises have a fairly lackluster history when it comes to their multiplayer additions. Generally you get the feeling that these elements are a bit of an afterthought. Kung Fu Panda’s are actually quite fun. Four player involvement is available with multiple gamestyles ranging from a Smash Brother’s Brawl type player vs player game to a cooperative game in which you and your friends must fend off enemies until time runs out. It’s not just fighting games though, there’s memory games and Chinese checkers styled board games but many of these have to be unlocked by finding jade coins scattered throughout the levels.
Based on the amount of homes it’s infiltrated and its family friendly image it would seem the Wii would be the ideal place to make a home for a kid’s title such as Kung Fu Panda. Unfortunately, as with many of the games that have obviously been designed with other consoles in mind, Kung Fu Panda has a hard time of matching its content with motion controls. We’ve seen others do it worse, but when it comes down to it, if you’ve got another console along with a Wii the obvious pick for this is the non-Wii version of the game.
-----------------------------------------------------------
Screenshots are from the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions of the game
Loading...
