Developer: ChillyRoom
Publisher: Gloam Collective
Platform: PC, Switch
Tested on: Switch
World of Kungfu: Dragon and Eagle – Review
This is purely coincidental, but when we took a look at AWAKEN: Astral Blade a short while ago, we remarked that it’s not often that Chinese games make it to the West. Lo and behold, developer ChillyRoom has stepped up to bring us World of Kungfu: Dragon and Eagle. Unlike AWAKEN’s sci-fi setting, however, World of Kungfu is more representative of Chinese culture, being a wuxia title. Wuxi-what? Don’t worry if you’re unfamiliar with that term. We’ll get to it, alongside every other aspect of what World of Kungfu has to offer. Let’s dive in!
Story
There is a good chance that you are already familiar with what wuxia is, without knowing the term. It’s a genre of historical fantasy, specifically related to the martial arts of ancient China. The most prolific example is probably Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. We should mention that the fantasy element is a key component in wuxia, and an outright historical game like Romance of the Three Kingdoms wouldn’t be considered as belonging to the genre. World of Kungfu very much is a wuxia game, however. It’s a massive one too, with a vast world to explore, multiple intertwined storylines, and a suitably large cast. While the overarching plot itself can be difficult to follow, simply because of its sheer scale, World of Kungfu’s narrative saving grace are the individual story scenes.
After creating your own character, with a choice of backstory as well as appearance, your path begins just outside of a temple, which acts as the game’s tutorial area. Here, you’ll trade blows with a stranger dressed in blue, before two elderly martial artists show up, facing off against one another themselves. After their fight, they each leave a manual with their technique behind. You and the stranger each pick one up, become fast friends, and the adventure begins in earnest. World of Kungfu is set in an open world and the game doesn’t do a very good job of telling you where to go next. The advantage is that you can explore your surroundings at your own pace. The overarching narrative is ambitious but convoluted, involving an important military document and a war that divides the continent. Much of the story is choice-driven too. When you’re not occupying yourself with war crimes, you’ll also attend kung fu tournaments, deal with side quests, and even tackle mini-games like pop quizzes.
Graphics
One aspect that World of Kungfu nails is its aesthetics. The tiny sprites are characterful, with gorgeous hand-drawn portraits complementing them in dialogue scenes. The character designer is limited and fairly rudimentary but it still allows you to create a good-looking protagonist. The game cannot avoid a common pitfall, however, and that is that portraits are static, and that your self-created character’s portrait doesn’t change expressions to match emotions. The subdued color palette, with lots of browns, oranges, and beiges, works well enough to create a warm atmosphere. Granted, for a game about martial arts, we felt that the sprite animations were a bit stiff but this does tie into the retro atmosphere that the game tries to evoke.
Sound
As for audio, World of Kungfu delivers the kind of soundscape you’d expect. The soundtrack could have been pulled straight from a movie or show about ancient China. What the music lacks in originality it makes up for by setting the right mood. There is no voice acting, and the sound effects are adequate but nothing special.
Gameplay
We were both intrigued and excited by the core gameplay idea behind World of Kungfu. A full-fledged RPG with turn-based, tactical combat set on a grid, similar to old-school Fire Emblem? Sign us up! Our excitement was quickly tempered, however, once we actually got to grips with World of Kungfu. Part of it is because of how obtuse everything is. For how decently written the dialogue is at times, the game isn’t very good at explaining itself in terms of mechanics. We’re familiar with a wide range of titles in the turn-based strategy genre, but that didn’t help us with even figuring out how combat preparation worked. The idea is simple enough: taking control of your character, you wander around the world and talk to NPCs to progress the story. Some of those interactions will lead to fights, others to sidequests or rewards.
There are over 100 characters to recruit that can join you on the battlefield. In theory that sounds fine, but in practice things can get… random. Our first run ended because we accidentally picked a fight with a very angry rooster and got killed. That may have been a nod to The Legend of Zelda’s Cuccos. Sadly it didn’t just kill our character but also our motivation to continue playing, at least for a while. This wasn’t a case of us overestimating our combat prowess, but simply of the game not bothering you to explain how things worked.
Now, if World of Kungfu’s obtuseness was the game’s only issue, we would have probably given it a passing grade. There have been plenty of instances where a game doesn’t cover anything but the very basics in its tutorial, and where we had to resort to online guides. World of Kungfu’s second, and arguably worse cardinal sin is that it’s a buggy, glitchy mess of a game. Portions of dialogue are missing and character portraits sometimes don’t even show up at all. We’ve encountered instances of the game locking up entirely, characters unintentionally warping to random spots on the battlefield, and even outright crashes.
The game’s interface sometimes only responds to touch inputs instead of button presses, and there doesn’t seem to be any rhyme or reason to it. If the rest of the gameplay was worth it, then we’d recommend waiting for patches instead of struggling with it, but there’s nothing here that is actually worth the uphill battle. From what we understand, World of Kungfu plays out over the course of 50-ish hours. If it had been free of glitches, we’d say that it’d be worth the €17.99 price tag, but as it stands, the game is worth neither your money nor your time.
Conclusion
We really wanted to like World of Kungfu, but the game turned out to be a disappointment. The obtuseness of the game’s combat mechanics, combined with the sheer amount of bugs and glitches that we encountered, made for a game that simply didn’t have any redeeming qualities when it came to gameplay. While we absolutely enjoyed World of Kungfu’s aesthetics and narrative, these weren’t enough to redeem the rest of what the game had to offer.
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