Jackie Chan Adventures

"Jackie Chan was Kung-Fu fighting..."

Jackie Chan Adventures is a game where the legendary Jackie Chan sets out in search for eight missing ancient scrolls after a member of the Dark Hand destroys Jackie Chan's uncle's store and steals the scrolls from the Chan family. The magical scrolls are said to give its finder special Kung-Fu abilities.
The game translated most of the graphical traits from the cartoon series over to the cartridge pretty well. Jackie Chan and friends looked surprisingly similar to their cartoon counterpart, as did his enemies and foes. The design of the levels gives off the feeling that you were truly playing at locations inside of the cartoon.

The music is different from what is usually heard in the cartoon series, but that is not necessarily a bad thing in this game. Each level had its own looping track that matched the environment while conveying the sense of urgency and danger of the current situation. The little extra grunt that Jackie Chan made when he died was unnecessary, as it made him sound like an old man. However, that can easily be avoided by...not dying.

Those were the good attributes of this game, now on to the bad...

The odd thing about this game is that it is very limited in attacks, despite it housing the Jackie Chan name. There must be more to Kung-Fu than just a bunch of different kicks and punches. Creativity was lacking in huge amounts here.

The sluggish controls made the attacks and movements very uninteresting to watch, which led on to boring and long levels. The whole game's animation made Jackie Chan and his enemies crawl along at a snail's pace. This seriously hindered the game and made every movement of the enemies and bosses quite predictable. This is definitely not something that would be seen in the cartoon series, which tends to have fast-paced scuffles.

Added along to the slow pace of the game were the repetitious levels, which just had onslaughts of the same enemies over and over again. The only distinction between the levels themselves were the background and environment. Besides that, it was just a repetition of punching, kicking, and walking forward. Rinse and repeat.

Overall, a little bit of creativity here and there would have helped this game tremendously and made it much more interesting to play. Despite it actually having just a few levels, game play seemed drawn out and made longer than what it should have been. While playing, it always had me wondering...

"When will this level end?"

...just so I could save my game and turn it off.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 11/17/05