Bruce Lee Dragon Warrior HD reminds me of countless afternoons trying to master the drunken fighting style of my favorite Virtual fighter character in the local arcade. But at times BLDW felt frustratingly like trying to play on a machine with a button that sticks a bit. You could still play, but pulling tricky moves took real effort.
Visually BLDW is fantastic. Graphics are blocky at times but that hardly matters when there’s such a wonderful fluidity to the movement. Every punch, kick, and grab feels real, only aided by excellent sound design that also provides audio cues that help to execute moves.
BLDW has a surprising amount of content, too. There are five game modes (Story Mode, Arcade, Time Attack, Versus and Survival) and a grand total of ten unlockable characters each with their own style of fighting. These fighting styles can also be mixed and matched to replace any character defaults. Although you can’t customize the look of the characters you do have an amazing amount of variety in what type of fighter you can use.
The majority of BLDW takes place in the fairly entertaining Story Mode. You start as a young, brawling Bruce Lee who gets noticed after a street fight by a bloke from a local Dojo. After challenging you to a fight he is so impressed that he invites you to join the school. From there you get into the meat of the game, fighting sparing matches, tournaments, and random opponents in order to level up, unlock other moves and fighters, and in my case get my ass repeatedly handed to me by an AI set to Medium. It would take me an insane amount of tries against the same opponent to win. Sometimes out of frustration I’d just button mash, which usually caused the AI to block all the high punches and kicks and then throw me to the ground. I’d try to buy some time to pause and check the combo list, double tap back so I could move quickly away from my opponent, only to see him match my direction and speed. The opponents were on me like lifers on the prison noob who dropped the soap.
Prison rape reference aside, this does bring me to my reason for hating BLDW: it has no real buttons. It’s a bit of a conundrum as the iPad wouldn’t be what it is if Apple embraced physical buttons or even allowed reassignment of the few buttons available. Developers can only try to make the best out of a less than ideal hardware situation and in that lies my basic dislike. The game falls squarely into the “just because you can do a thing it doesn’t necessarily follow that you must do that thing.” BLDW clearly proves that there can be good fighting games on the iPad, but I’m not convinced that “good” is good enough.
Can a fighting game stand on it’s other merits enough to ignore a basic deficit in the controls? Is a good story, fun fighting mechanics, and Bruce Lee enough? My basic memories of the fighting games I’ve loved are composed 50% of muscle memory. Two button combo presses for Soul Calibur, forward half moon + Punch for Street Fighter. I need the tactile feedback. I need it because it works. Because some 17 years since I stood in front of an SFII arcade I can still remember the exact feel of the timing to unleash Guiles Sonic Boom.
BLDW has a very basic control layout. You have a D-Pad/Analogue Stick on the left and two buttons on your right for punch and kick. That’s it. Any variations of that are achieved by combining the D-Pad with those two buttons. The game comes with a fairly decent tutorial mode where you can practice the basics and more complicated combos, counters, and grabs. Trust me when I say that I have spent more time in Training Mode than in Story Mode. I’ve been desperately trying to commit to memory that Forward, Down allows me to counter moves (or was it Down, Forward?). I’ve practiced and practiced and started getting the timing almost correct against the tutorial A.I. but then I play a real match and watch as my opponent kicks my ass.
Wining, when it happens, can be very satisfying, but is such a rarity against these “Medium Difficulty” opponents that half the time I just shut the game off in frustration.
There’s something odd about the way the game queues inputs, too. I could be flat on my ass and the game will queue my taps with all the judgment of a lemming so that little by little the the more complex moves I try to use the more like an epileptic seizure my attacks becomes. It all becomes a bit more playable dialed back to “easy”.
Truth be told I have a grudging admiration for Digital Legends for making a good fighting game for the iPad. I’m just not sure it’s enough even if in the end the game is still on my iPad for the occasional indulgence of making Bruce Lee do his signature “Waaaaa” sound when stomach punching an opponent.
