Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon

"Just what movie is this game based upon?"

From the fact that this game is titled Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and it features images from the film Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, you could say that this game is ‘based' upon the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Well, you would be wrong. The links between movie and game are tenuous at best, and it would be unfair to even say this game has a ‘base'.

First of all, the stories of the film and the game are as similar as those of Crime and Punishment and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. The very few dialogues are sloppily written and out of character, but even the actual events of the story have been changed for absolutely no reason whatsoever. Like in the PS2 game, in this version Jiao Long starts by stealing the Celestial Sword following Bi Yen Ju Li's orders. Never mind that originally the former is impulsive and hates being ordered around and the latter actually advices against the theft. That's not all, though: a bigger example of the atrocities the movie's superbly-developed plot has had to suffer is that the desert flashback now isn't a flashback at all, but takes place after the theft of the sword. The desert scene is the one that sets Jiao Long's motivation for the whole movie, the reason why everything is happening, so the whole story suffers from changing it.

The gameplay is no better, I'm afraid. This is a side-scrolling beat'em-up; these games are being designed since the very dawn of videogames, so it's beyond me how companies can still produce something that fails to provide anything new or original to the genre and still not manage to be fun, challenging or whatever other qualities said genre is known to give. You only control Jiao Long, for starters, and her movelist is limited and uninteresting. The same could be said about the enemies, to be frank, unless you find a certain interest in how wildly out of place they are. None of them actually look Chinese, their brightly coloured and pixelated design is more ‘fantasy' than ‘historic'. There is a Spiderman-like enemy that sticks to ceilings, and a female ninja kind of person who jumps in and out of the ground. My personal favourite is the Indian fakir, a guy that threatens your life by somersaulting and landing exactly in front of you, establishing no physical contact whatsoever.

The Indian fakir is just one example of that lousy AI we typically identify with the 32-bit console era, or directly with the first Game Boy. Enemies in this Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon can and WILL charge at you, miss, and keep running happily until they leave from the opposite end of the screen. Likewise, projectile-throwing enemies will keep flinging axes in the same trajectory, rhythm and direction for as long as you feel like looking, regardless of what you do or where.

Is there anything that could save this button-masher from being so tedious? The striking visual identity of the film probably could, but we'll never know. There are about three or maybe four different backgrounds in the whole game, and maybe half a dozen enemies. The former are nondescript and the latter downright ugly, so in the end staring at this game is as unfulfilling as playing it. The more you liked the movie, the more it hurts to see it transformed into a pointless and aesthetically unpleasant game.

Reviewer's Score: 3/10, Originally Posted: 02/08/06, Updated 02/13/06