The World of Kungfu: Dragon and Eagle

I’ll freely admit that I may not be the target audience for World of Kungfu: Dragon and Eagle. I have minimal experience with the historical wuxia genre beyond watching Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon a few times and playing the Imperial China chapter of LIVE A LIVE. That said, I also love both of those things, so the prospect of a grid-based RPG with a sprawling wuxia story got me quite excited. The prospect of this game fully immersing me into this time period and culture was just too interesting to pass up.

Having now played the game, I realize my excitement could not have been more misplaced, and I must bear some unfortunate news to anyone invested in the wuxia genre. World of Kungfu is a failure on almost every level. The massive scale and scope of its plot results in a story that is only comprehensible in broad terms. Its combat is serviceable, but the mechanics of preparing your characters for battle are obtuse and unbalanced. Its one saving grace, the massive world and secrets found within, are squandered so spectacularly that it’s hard to imagine World of Kungfu being any good as a functional version of itself. Shockingly, it doesn’t even manage that much.

The plot starts with your customizable main character resting at a temple, only to be attacked by a man in blue robes. Fending him off, you two immediately witness a duel between two master martial artists who leave two manuals behind. After choosing yours, you and your assailant become friends for some inscrutable reason and soon set out to aimlessly explore the world. If you stumble upon the place the game wants you to go, you get swept up in a conflict over an important military document that veers in and out of relevance as you attend multiple kung-fu tournaments, get involved in a war, and find your loyalties tested through a series of branching choices that might have been engaging if the story driving them was coherent.

It’s hard for me to get a handle on World of Kungfu‘s story due to its odd delivery. The script features a baragge of names, titles, locations, and factions for which new players have no proper context during every major story beat. Even moments that feel intended to be character-driven spout so much ceaseless exposition that note-taking or some degree of historical familiarity with the setting feel like prerequisites. The sheer density of information gave me a massive headache whenever I attempted to understand it.

This lack of clarity affects story progression as well. Finding your next objective in World of Kungfu is usually simple but turns Kafkaesque far more often than any game should allow. Certain story branches are locked behind stat checks, usually for “Morality,” without even explaining to the player why a particular option is sufficiently just or evil. Oftentimes, the game points toward a certain location with only a vague sense of where said location is, and in rare instances, you might have barred yourself out of story progression with no clear way to move forward. At one point, when the player has to attend a kung-fu tournament at Taihu Lake, the story will stall if an earlier sidequest there isn’t finished. Doing so requires standing on a completely unmarked space at one point, and that is far from the last roadblock.

If World of Kungfu had any great gameplay hooks, I’d be able to forgive its weaknesses in story, aesthetics, or direction. Unfortunately, the gameplay is passable at best and a massive pain the other 90% of the time. Exploring the game’s stock set of rotating environments is usually a slog, and while treasure chests do exist, you find most items by tapping the selection button on completely unmarked objects. This hidden loot is not inconsequential, either. It’s the only way to find many kung-fu manuals and stat-boosters.

There are also recurring sets of dialogue and quizzes that can alter your parameters or earn you items if you go around talking to NPCs, but they’re wildly inconsistent in execution. The first dialogue prompt available from an optional NPC always decreases your morality parameter even on the best response, while several of the quizzes assume you have detailed knowledge of Chinese history and poetic couplets. One of these quizzes actually takes place during a story moment and requires the player to correctly answer 20 Chinese history questions in a row.

Battle fares better if only because it’s usually too simple to misunderstand. It uses a standard grid-style turn-based system with skills of varying size and range. Learning and leveling them up is easy enough, but the game’s open-ended nature makes it hard to tell what level you should be before any given encounter, and it’s a massive pain to raise up new units. Furthermore, area-of-effect skills have far more utility than single-target moves since encounters rely less on strategic enemy placement in unique environments than throwing hordes of enemies at you even when you control one unit. The only reason I could get as far as I did was due to stumbling upon an easily missable skill with a massive range. There are unique elements like creating your own skills or altering existing kung-fu manuals, but the mechanics on that front are about as obtuse as the story.

The presentation of the whole affair doesn’t help much. The sprites are adequate in isolation, but their inability to move dynamically make them a poor fit for a game about martial arts. The character portraits, on the other hand, are actually quite nice to look at, though the confusing presentation of the plot makes it hard to tie most characters’ aesthetics to any sense of personality. And the most I can say about the music and sound effects is that they’re serviceable but bland; a series of retro-style Chinese strings and flutes that I might not be so ambivalent towards if they used them for more songs.

World of Kungfu‘s saving grace turns out to be its optional content. Getting lost in sidequests, many of which end in gaining new party members, is the highlight of the whole experience in the early game. By the time the player approaches the Central Plains and the plot is kicking into high gear though, the few new characters left are bizarrely low-leveled. Then, at a pivotal moment, the main character becomes separated from the rest of their party with no proper guidance to reunite with them. At least some of the group is re-recruitable, but there isn’t any sense of logic behind where they’re found. In a game almost entirely made of low points, this was the Mariana Trench, taking the one aspect of World of Kungfu that seemed genuinely exciting and flipping it around to make all the expended effort seem useless.

This would all be sufficient to sink the whole experience, but the game is also noticeably incomplete. World of Kungfu arrived pre-release with missing features, with the inability to remove useless skills from your characters as the most damning, locking them into whatever low-level Kung-fu you slapped onto them first. This is on top of missing lines of dialogue and missing character portraits, problems that were only partially fixed after the day one update. It would be one thing if the missing content was inconsequential, but this can have potentially serious ramifications for a playthrough. A specific stat check needed to recruit a character in the Central Plains section is completely missing text, so if you haven’t already met it, you don’t even know what stat to invest in when you reload a save.

If that wasn’t enough, a stunning amount of serious bugs exacerbate the experience even further. Entering battle in specific areas locks the game, the game can throw characters to random spots on the battle grid in certain fights, movement stops working at random, and certain menus only work with touch controls with no indication. In one instance, multiple events on the Central Plains caused the game to crash five times in only a couple hours. There is no other way of saying this: for a game advertising itself as a full release, this level of incompleteness and bugginess is simply not acceptable.

World of Kungfu is the kind of bad game that wastes your time and makes even its best qualities hurt you in the end. As it stands, the only audience I can imagine for it consists of those actively seeking out janky messes. I thought I could occasionally find enjoyment in overcoming the broken parts, but that doesn’t make the game good. Plenty of other great RPGs, new and old, will give you so much more back than this one. This is one fight that just isn’t worth it.