Wu Tang Shaolin Style

Pros • Unmatched story mode • Great character and atmosphere • Four-player fighting	Cons • Slow movement • Some control irritants • Multiplayer modes could have been much more (who ever heard of a fight game where single-player play is better than multiplayer contests?)
Bottom Line Kung Fu and hip hop is a match made in gaming heaven! Wu Tang Shaolin Style successfully merges the stylized, creative violence of Hong Kong fight movies and the dominant force of style and cool in North American consumer culture, hip hop, to create the most engaging single player fight game yet released. Wu Tang Shaolin Style is also interesting in that it uses the game engine from the cancelled Thrill Kill project, which means that it is a four-player, count them, four, twice as many as your standard two-player fight game. But, it is the style more than the substance of this game that makes it recommendable

A good idea is like a boil on your backside. They’re so painfully obvious once they emerge, not to mention the fact that most people have never experienced either. The fact that the creative individuals who, collectively, call themselves the Wu Tang Clan came up with such a great game concept is no surprise, but the fact that no one else has merged kung fu fight movies with hip hop is. The amalgamation is unspeakably brilliant. An idea whose time has come. Let there be movies, comics, toys, t-shirts, exercise videos…

Wu Tang Shaolin Style opens with and contains a couple more of the best computer generated video cut scenes this side of Final Fantasy VIII. They are campy, kung fu moviesque sequences set in the ‘hood’, and the game follows with that atmosphere. Each of the Wu Tang Clan members has been translated into a kung fu master, and the characters are distinct– ranging from weapon wielding to drunken master style – and, like the persons they are modeled on, entertaining. Now throw in some sampled Wu Tang Clan music (although it’s not much and, as judged by this rural white boy, not the best of their work), and an enhanced version of the four player arena fight engine from the cancelled Thrill Kill, do the hokey pokey, shake it all about and you’ve got the most engaging single player fight game yet created.

Story Mode

The Story Mode, like fight game Story Modes always are, is simply a string of battles towards the final boss. Where Wu Tang Shaolin Style rises above other fight games is in the variety of battles that a four player game engine allows and in the chamber collection required to complete the game and also to unlock the requisite “secrets.”

Typical Story Modes, are simply a string of battles between a player and all of the characters in the game, until one arrives at and defeats the final boss. The Story Mode of Wu Tang Shaolin Style isn’t much different in form, but the ability to have four characters in a brawl dramatically changes things. Battles can pit the player against one, two or three enemies, or even with one or two friends against a lesser number of tougher enemies. The developers have also varied the types of battles. Alternative battles have the player required to survive a certain amount of time, defeat a certain number of enemies or even defend an injured comrade. The very cool video sequences also add greatly to the experience, and the other challenge is the collection of chambers.

Collecting all of the chambers is required in order to discover the final boss in the Story Mode. It also unlocks extra characters, alternate costumes – some of which are very alternate – concept art, extra fatalaties and so on. These chambers are awarded for defeating certain enemies and also for using specific moves or stringing together lengthy combos, etc. It is difficult to discover how they are all rewarded the first time through (it’s the same for every character, as, unfortunately, is the path through Story Mode). With some of the characters, it is also very difficult to pull off the lengthy combos and requires significant practice and hours worth of attempts, but that all adds up to hours and hours of replay. It would be nice if characters had different paths through Story Mode and individual methods of acquiring chambers, but those types of extra goodness seem reserved for sequels these days so that the original can ship by Christmas, sigh.

Multiplayer

Unfortunately, Wu Tang Shaolin Style is not as brilliantly executed a multiplayer game as it is a single player game. While gathering four friends around a PlayStation and beating each other to bloody pulps is enormously fun, the multiplayer game lacks the variety of game types displayed in the single player experience and the game only tells you who was the last one standing, which means that the cheap bastard who hides in the corner and steps in late usually wins. If the game could at least tell you who did the most damage or used the fanciest moves etc., the experience would be much improved. Also, the combos are arcane button combos that must be memorized so newcomers get creamed mercilessly until they are given some time alone with the excellent practice mode.

While Wu Tang Shaolin style has the best atmosphere of any fight game, it doesn’t have the best control. Move animations are unbreakable, which means that if an enemy picks up your friend in preparation for a body slam, you can’t kick that enemy in the back of the head. They are made invulnerable until the animation runs its course. Also, the combo system of Wu Tang Shaolin Style, – each character has a huge list of combos and special moves that take many hours to remember – while well suited to the slow pace of the game engine, has little logic to it and must simply be memorized for each character. Also, the game is pickier on input than the strictest of kung fu masters. Simply mashing the three buttons required for a combo with your big, overgrown, joystick muscular thumb doesn’t work. The game reads the order in which the buttons were simultaneously pressed, even when it is simultaneous. You have to simultaneously push the buttons in the exact (simultaneous) order that the combo requires (simultaneously) which means using three fingers, so expect some acrobatic simultaneous finger work to master this game and good luck ever pulling off some of the moves in the heat of battle.

Lastly, the Thrill Kill engine, even enhanced as it is in Wu Tang Shaolin Style, is a shade slow, even sped up in turbo mode which just means that they are plodding at a quicker pace, and the game is not overly impressive graphically. Characters move with that same sluggish, foot sliding of Knockout Kings, and not the fluid grace and speed of Soul Calibur. Everything in the game is in washed out gray tones, and lacks the colorful pop of most arcade fight games. Where the developers looked to make up for this is in the gore factor. We’re talking break an opponent in half over your knee, pull the losers head off of their shoulders, this game is rated Mature for a reason, fatalities. Some of the fatalities, especially the secondary ones that must be unlocked are creative, and fun to watch once or twice, but they rapidly grow tiresome. Fortunately they can be turned off, as can the gore, all protected with a Parental Lock feature that is about as effective as child proof caps on medicine bottles that any six year old can open but that most adults cannot.

Info & Screenshots