Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (PS2)
Someone seems to have hidden the fun…
by Susie Vee

PLATFORM: PS2

PUBLISHER: Ubisoft

DEVELOPER: Genki

GENRE: Action

ESRB: Teen

SCORE:

Three years after the release of Ang “Hulk” Lee’s masterpiece of martial arts mayhem, comes this unexpected video game tie-in. On its surface, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon seems perfect for a game concept, with all its running, jumping and slashing. As a film, and game, with some of the coolest female characters we’ve seen in a long time, it also seems like a perfect GameGal title.

Sadly, Ubisoft and Genki have slapped their A-list license on a substandard beat-‘em-up game. You’ll end up fighting through literally endless hordes of identical attackers, repeating the same few moves and combos over and over and over again. It was literally one of the few games in recent memory that actually made our thumbs hurt.

The limited combat options make for very little variety for much of the game. You'll some resort to almost random button-mashing to get through yet another wave of anonymous enemies.

On the plus side, you get to play as all three main characters; Li Mu Bai, Shu Lien, and Jen. The character models for the protagonists are very well done, and the cut scenes are likewise impressive. In an amusing touch, the cut scenes all feature Chinese dialog with English subtitles.

Level designs are a bit repetitive, and often involve some degree of tedious backtracking. Some levels are also a little too dependent on that old game-padding standby, jumping puzzles.

There some nice galleries of DVD-like extras you can unlock, but the game is such a slog, it seems unlikely that anyone would bother to go through it enough times to unlock them.

There just isn’t enough variety in either the action or setting of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon to really recommend it anyone but die-hard fans of the film.