Gaming Target - Xbox: Bruce Lee: Quest of the Dragon

Written by Gavin Wright on September 17, 2002

Full Review: Here's to hoping Bruce Lee comes back from the dead to beat up the people that made this game, he certainly wouldn't approve of this one.

Bruce Lee has been a household name for decades, and yet we still haven't seen a video game that has recreated the experience of his classic С70s films. Ronin Entertainment, a small upstart subsidiary of Universal Interactive, has taken the Bruce Lee license and turned it into an Xbox-exclusive brawler. Unfortunately, Bruce Lee: Quest of the Dragon isn't quite what we were hoping for; not only does it fail to bring us any of the thrills of the movies, it also does nothing to raise the bar as far as the fighting genre goes.

QOTD's story isn't based off of any of Lee's movies. Mind you, it's still well within the realm of plausibility when it comes to Bruce Lee's movies, but it's a completely original story nonetheless. A 24-year old Bruce Lee returns to his monastery to find his father kidnapped and a sacred relic stolen. His teacher explains that the Black Lotus gang is behind all of this, and Lee sets off on a quest to take them down.

The fighting system itself is deceptively deep. You can punch, kick, and throw an enemy using one of hundreds of Lee's signature moves. By combining the Punch and Kick buttons with different directions on the D-pad, you can pull of devastating combos. In about the only speck of innovation to be found in this game, combos can also be used to attack multiple enemies at the same time. You can also throw a no-look punch behind you or to your sides without turning to face the opponent.

The problem is that the system never really works the way it should. You are rarely given a chance to land any of the more difficult attacks, so you're usually stuck mashing the Kick and Punch buttons in hopes of landing an attack before you're hit by one of the enemies. Compounding this problem is the fact that the game also has trouble registering button presses in time, or sometimes even at all. Even if you perform a combo perfectly, it will still only work about half of the time. In fact, combos become useless once you realize that mashing the Punch and Kick buttons is just as effective since you are so much faster than any of your opponents. Once you've grasped this concept, the only real challenge in the game is the terrible lock-on targeting system. It will automatically lock onto an opponent when you attack them, allowing the other enemies a chance to hit away at you while you're trying to beat down another guy. While plans for the fighting system look good on paper, the design has been poorly executed.

Bruce Lee's illogical, inexplicably bad control scheme is a perfect compliment to the game's other shortcomings, ensuring that anyone even remotely interested in the game would be turned away as soon as they gave it a chance. The A, B, and X buttons are used to Punch, Kick, and Block; the Y button is used for special attacks (or so I'm told); the Black button puts Bruce on fire, making attacks significantly more powerful; the L trigger is used to lock on to the nearest opponent and can also be used to target multiple opponents for kicks and punches, while the R trigger takes you out of lock-on mode; the left joystick or D-pad can be used to control the character, while the right joystick is used to throw a no-look punch in any direction. The control scheme is so unintuitive that even by the time you've gotten used to it you'll probably already be sick of the game.

Each level in the game is composed of different sections that trigger fights with multiple enemies. Most of these fights are straight-up brawls, but others throw in some variety by offering rewards for killing enemies within a set time limit. At the end of an area, which is usually made up of three or four levels, a small portion of the plot will be revealed and you'll be given the opportunity to save your game. An area usually ends with a one-on-one boss fight, which oddly enough tends to be easier than the rest of the level. You have three lives to get through each area, and if you lose them all you must start over. Continuing on with this trend of УoddФ, when you begin a new area you start out with the amount of lives you had left at the end of the last area, so it's actually better to just kill yourself off in order to get the full three lives back. This thread of incompetence is actually quite constant throughout the game.

The levels themselves are very linear and restrictive. It looks like you can roam freely through the levels, but when you try to stumble off the main path invisible borders will impede your progress. There is absolutely no interaction with the levels, no hitting switches or opening doors, and even things like climbing ladders and walking up stairs are done automatically when you approach them. I have yet to discover even a single side path in the entire game. You really get the feeling that you are being walked though everything, being given no decisions to make for yourself.

After you kill an enemy they drop coins that can be used at the end of each level to buy new moves and health/attack upgrades. You can also raise your martial arts ranking, which opens up some of the cooler signature moves in the game. The system allows you to restart a level if you die and use different upgrades to pass the level. You can't improve your stats too drastically, but it's still a novel concept.

The A.I. of the enemies is pretty weak, never dodging attacks or intentionally ganging up on you. Their attack patterns are easily recognizable after a short while, so you always know when to block and when to attack. You are usually facing off against 5 or 6 people at any given time, but they never seem to take advantage of this benefit. Two or three of them will attack you while the rest sit back and wait. Boss fights are particularly easy thanks to the poor A.I. You just watch them for a little while and see how they fight, then mash away on the buttons when the time is right. The game can seem a bit difficult for the first few levels, but you'll eventually catch on to their tricks and learn to fight accordingly.

QOTD is only about a 7-8 hour game the first time through, and probably about half that for someone that's good at the game. There's not much of an inclination to play through the game a second time (or even a first time, for that matter), unless you want to try out the game in Hard mode. You do get something special for completing the game your first time out, but it's more like something that was thrown in to keep people from complaining about the game's length (apparently they were thinking that was all they would complain about).

You'll see so many load screens in QOTD that they'll become almost intolerable. It takes ten seconds to load up the menu before each level, then another 5 seconds to load the cutscene at the beginning, then yet another 10 seconds to actually load the level itself. If that's not enough, the game will also freeze after each battle to load again. It's outrageous that a system with 64 MB of RAM and a hard drive still loads like a Playstation game. It would have been quite easy for Ronin to at least optimize the code to fix this problem, because we know they weren't using the extra development time to work on the gameplay.

If you're looking for a game that will impress your friends, pass this one up. QOTD uses very few of the Xbox's graphical capabilities and the effects it does use aren't done very well. Textures, lighting effects, and character models are all shoddy. Bruce himself doesn't even look quite right in the game. The game will actually freeze for about a second before each fight while it loads one of the animations, which can get very frustrating after a while. The camera is completely controlled by the computer, and sways around as you walk to show the action. Unfortunately, it's not always very good at showing what's around you, and it does occasionally get stuck on objects. About the only bright spot in the game's graphics are Bruce's animations, which are dead-on for the most part. Other than that, you could easily mistake it for an N64 game.

The in-game music reproduces the martial-arts movie feel of the game quite well most of the time, but where it tries new things it generally fails. I'm mainly talking about the punk rock riffs that are played from time to time to accentuate the action. It's not that they're bad, just that they are either underused or put in at the wrong times. Bruce Lee's in-game sound effects are done well, with different noises linked to certain moves. The game's voice acting isn't too bad, and certainly sounds like it could very well have been pulled out of his movies.