Revenge of the Wounded Dragons

Kombo’s Review Policy: Our reviews are written for you. Our goal is to write honest, to-the-point reviews that don’t waste your time. This is why we’ve split our reviews into four sections: What the Game’s About, What’s Hot, What’s Not and Final Word, so that you can easily find the information you want from our reviews.

What the Game’s About
Two brothers head out on a revenge-and-rescue mission after gangsters kill their grandfather and steal one brother’s girlfriend. Revenge of the Wounded Dragons is a side-scrolling martial arts brawler with local co-op.

What’s Hot
I really like Bruce Lee. Much like the Onion’s young Sammy Potts, I am a big fan of Bruce Lee’s “unbridled and elegant awesomeness.” I was excited to play a brawler that takes its cues from one of the best martial artists ever. The two-player co-op, too, sounded like a great time and I was looking forward to it. The only real positive thing to say, however, is that the game has a very forgiving difficulty level. The rest is derivative, boring, and, yes, borderline offensive.

What’s Not
Bruce Lee once said that water can flow or crash. While some of the characters’ moves are reminiscent of the famous martial artist, the rest of the game seems to buck the philosophy entirely. With games that flow so well like N+ and Devil May Cry, the jerky motions are disappointing. It feels like each action is disconnected from the one before and the one that follows. The finishing moves look pretty cool on their own, but dancing back and forth to find the spot to do the neck-break finisher is irritating and keeps you from moving onto the next guy.

My real problem, though, isn’t with the controls; it’s with everything else, such as the aesthetics of the game — the music, voices, levels, enemies, pick-up items — the list goes on. The entirety of the game is based on easy, obvious Asian stereotypes that make the game difficult to play regardless of the control or fighting. It’s like a video game version of one of those cheap Michael Dudikoff martial-arts direct-to-video films. What’s worse, the game is taking itself seriously. Some tongue-in-cheek humor could’ve balanced out the strictly average gameplay. What if the guy was a Bruce Lee fanboy and was obsessed with emulating him? Or heck, even if the game was just self-aware of what it is. As much as it takes from things like Bruce Lee’s movies and Double Dragon, it doesn’t seem so much like homage or tribute as it does a rehash.

First is the music and audio. Whenever anyone talks, it has a nondescript Asian accent. The music is mostly of a ’70s grindhouse sort; though the trailer features music not all that different from the “Oriental Riff” you hear whenever the sitcom characters go to Chinatown to have a “cultural experience.”

It gets worse. The main characters’ grandpa sports a Fu Manchu mustache and wears the loose robes you always see the old martial arts masters wearing in TV shows. Enemies include a crazy knife-throwing chef, guys that jump out of trees wearing conical hats, and guys dressed like an evil version of Bruce Lee’s iconic yellow and black jumpsuit to name a few. There’s even a boss that decided rural China was the best place to go after leaving the S&M Biker Bar.

The thing that really brings it into stark relief — something I think a lot of people might miss — is how the health pickups are bowls of rice with chopsticks sticking out. Not only is it bad manners to leave your chopsticks in the rice (at least they’re not sticking straight up and down, that would be even more offensive), but rice, really? It’s an incredibly thoughtless decision on the part of the developers that shows a total lack of research into the culture they’re co-opting. A bandage, a syringe, a framed picture of Bruce Lee, just about anything would be better.

Final Word
At $9.99, this game is extremely difficult to recommend. While there’s a lot of game here with more than 20 levels and local co-op play, what’s here just isn’t that good. There are better brawlers current and past, and the cultural issues with this one just guarantee that if it’s not forgotten entirely, it’ll be in someone’s Worst Of list.