I stumbled upon Wing Chun Pak Sung Bo Legends last week while browsing through Steam's Newly Released Games category and discovered a new favorite. If you've never heard of the game, don't worry, I hadn't either. But I'm glad I found it.

My first thought after playing the first few levels was, 'Finally! Someone created a fighting game that isn't choreographed but instead shows the mindless mayhem associated when you get a bunch of drunk guys together trying to knock each other out!'

At first, the fights take on a comedic overtone with slapstick humor. But they do bring out some of the same exuberance I felt when watching Kung Fu theatre back in the day. Flying through the air, defying gravity and logic are the selling point here. Playing the game for an hour or two made me realize that It's not who wins that matters, it's who looks the most ridiculous doing it.

Part of the appeal for many of the over-the-top martial art games is that you can't do these off-the-wall maneuvers in real life because of the unfortunate restrictions imposed by the laws of physics. But what the heck, it's fun to watch.

The fighting mechanics can get bogged down making the flow feel like you're in slow motion. But you can lunge forward through the duller moments to get to its action sequence before too long.

Further complicating the game's slow pace is the constant dueling push-and-pull of your character's grappling and striking skills which works often but not enough times to do it consistently. Even as I write this, I was never able to duplicate certain moves as I would have liked.

This is mostly due to the ragdoll physics which makes stringing together multi-hit combos difficult to execute because character animations are displayed to the extreme. When you knock someone out, they go flying like a balloon that just had its air let out.

A few more gripes I have include the lackluster tutorial and lack of explanation of certain levels. For example, the rooms where you have to break the tables and have to dodge incoming cannonballs to advance don't really add value to the game unless I'm missing something important here.

Kudos, however, to the developers at KotarosDevGame who obviously view themselves with jest. They get the joke and they seem to be enjoying themselves when designing the game. There's a lighthearted banter about the title that's infectious if you open yourself up to it.

Any attempt to defend Wing Chun Pak Sung Bo Legends on rational grounds is futile. Don't tell me about the plot, the storyline, or the graphics. The whole point is to have fun and if we allow ourselves to get into the right frame of mind, we all should be having fun with this game too.

Joel

Healthcare Professional, Gamer, and Writer all rolled up in one. He once opened up an old Atari 2600 to see if it had a heart ... and it did. Hence, the lifelong love affair with gaming.

www.walawala.gg