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Kung Fu
Chaos
Score: 8.5 / 10
No offense to the Karate Kid, but fitting
Kung Fu Chaos into a particular gaming genre is harder than trying to
catch a fly with chopsticks. At its heart, it’s a fighting game. But
Kung Fu Chaos could also be described as a party game chock full of
mini-games, a la Nintendo’s Mario Party. Throw in some 70’s music, a ton
of bad puns, chop-socky humor, cartoony, bobble-headed characters and
what you have is Kung Fu Chaos, which may be best described as a solid
fighter that likes to party hearty.
This game is chaotic Kung Fu brawling at its finest. The premise of the
game is that you are working on the newest low-budget movie of Golden
Marvelous Productions under the creative control of loudmouth Hong Kong
fighting flick director Shao Ting, who like his name, reels off one bad
pun after another in the game’s cut-scenes
that introduce each level. Kung Fu Chaos
tries to be funny, it really does. But there are just too many unfunny
wisecracks from Shao Ting (Shao Ting = shouting, get it? Yeah, I know
not funny) to consider Kung Fu Chaos a humorous game.
Kung Fu Chaos’ “levels” are really mini-games that are based on famous
movies but with a low-budget take only
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Shao Ting could imagine with plenty of kung fu fighting actors. There’s
the “Gigantic” levels: Shao Ting’s interpretation of Titanic and another
based on Jurassic Park; War of the Worlds-inspired alien activity, and
naturally plenty of martial arts fighting. A lot of levels to be sure,
but it could have been better if there were more individually-designed
levels based on other movie themes or clichés instead of having a couple
of levels for each included movie theme as ripped off by Shao Ting.
Your job as one of the “actors” is to get at least a three-to-five-star
rating for each scene shot for the movie. If you do get that “pass”
rating (i.e. three stars) or higher, you’ll open up more levels to play
in the miniseries mode, the ninja challenge, battle, and championship
modes. To get a good star rating on each level, mostly it comes down to
defeating a large number of progressively harder-to-defeat enemies. The
higher the rating, the more you’ll unlock. And that will allow you to
take full advantage of the sensational multiplayer gaming of Kung Fu
Chaos.
The real charm of Kung Fu Chaos is its multiplayer. Up to four players
can partake in Kung Fu Chaos battling at one time. If you do get
four-player games going, Kung Fu Chaos becomes almost the best
multiplayer fighting game (right behind Dead or Alive 3) you’ll see on
the Xbox right now.
While you will be doing a lot of fighting, there’s more than that to do
in Kung Fu Chaos. This is where the Mario Party influence comes in. On
some levels, there are party game activities like trying to knock
opponents off of teetering bamboo platforms by throwing an incapacitated
princess at each other. On one of the “Gigantic” levels, the goal is to
knock your other life preserver-wearing opponents off of a precariously
slippery small floating iceberg. Kung Fu Chaos is the fighter that’s the
life of the party.
Actors you can select from all have punned
names similar to Shao Ting's, but fortunately, there’s no serious
attempt at cramming the same bad humor of Shao Ting into their persona.
Thankfully, there’s a diverse selection of actor-slash-fighters to
choose from, including the feminine variety. You can pick from the
roller skate-and-yoyo wielding Candi Roll, the father-son tandem Chop
and Styx, Pam Grier-inspired Lucy Cannon and Ninja, Fu Hiya among
others.
Straying from the more realistic look of the fighting rosters of games
like Dead or Alive 3, Kakuto Chojin, and Tao Feng, this Xbox-exclusive
fighting cast is bobble-headed and cartoony in appearance. It sort of
takes the same graphical approach that Nintendo’s new Legend of Zelda:
The Wind Waker takes where the cartoon appearance of Link somehow
perfectly fits the gameplay. This cartoonish rendering style fits well
with the tongue-in-cheek attitude Kung Fu Chaos tries to capture too.
Overall, the game is highlighted by some stellar visuals, particularly
when there are bodies of water involved in the action. However, don’t
let the cartoonish graphics fool you. If you think that the cartoony
graphics translate into a kiddie game, you’re wrong. There’s a good
fighting game under the hood, sans the heavy bloodshed that occurs in
today’s usual fighting game.
Controls and available moves in Kung Fu Chaos are impressive. There are
a multitude of offensive attacks, counterattack moves, and defensive
protection moves. And controls are extremely responsive, a necessity for
a fighting game. The best inclusion in the game’s move list are the
character-specific taunting Super Attacks. After dropping an opponent,
by successfully unleashing an expletive-laced (in the form of some
oversized cartoon expletives: #%&!) verbal taunt, you get a taunt point.
Garner three taunt points, and you can then use the character’s taunt
Super Attack, which comes in handy against formidable enemies. You can
also steal taunt points, too, which makes it necessary to strategize
your gameplay.
Challenging gameplay is part of the Kung Fu Chaos multiplayer
experience. But if you are squaring off in the single-player miniseries
mode, then the challenge can drop off sometimes dramatically because
there are levels where the same enemies come out at the same exact spot
each time. This repetitive re-spawning makes it easy to master a level
without much of a fight, bringing a boredom to Kung Fu Chaos that
wouldn’t be there if there was more randomization.
Head-scratchingly puzzling is why Kung Fu Chaos can’t be played over
Xbox Live. If ever a game seemed perfectly suited for online Xbox Live
gaming, Kung Fu Chaos is it. But that aside, despite not being a
entirely satisfying single-player title, multiplayer gaming done on a
non-split-screen arena overtakes any of the shortcomings of Kung Fu
Chaos and thrusts it with sidekick ferocity into the same neighborhood
of Dead or Alive 3 as far as Xbox fighting games go.
No doubt about it, after the disastrously awful Kakuto Chojin, and the
uneven Tao Feng, Kung Fu Chaos finally brings the Xbox a good quality
fighting game from a Microsoft first-party development house. A
surprisingly solid collection of various offensive and defensive moves,
good visuals, and plain all-out fun multiplayer gaming more than makes
up for the few small shortcomings of Kung Fu Chaos. Not entirely a
fighter, not exactly a party game, Kung Fu Chaos contains a good mix of
both gaming genres to deliver a title that should be considered
purchase-worthy.
