The Legend of Tianding (Switch eShop) Review

It is always a pleasure to see an underrepresented culture or time period in video games. In The Legend of Tianding, you are thrown onto the streets of Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, in the early 20th century as the legendary outlaw Liao Tianding. It’s a wonderfully authentic shot with locations that feel incredibly live with bustling streets and tall, imposing structures lining the roads. It’s also a game that unfortunately doesn’t fully respect players’ time, stubbornly refraining from showing their best at frequent intervals.

The game is divided into chapters, each of which tells its own independent story in the life of Liao Tianding. Stories typically start with a great deal of exposure and setting, before leading you to the main mission area where you’ll navigate a series of corridors and arenas, battling hordes of enemies as you go. It is a light version of the Metroidvania genre; the locations are generally pretty linear with only a few additional areas to explore for items or collectibles.

The true essence of the game focuses on your combat. If we were to directly compare it to another game, it is quite similar to Guacamelee! series, but showcases his own style and flavor with a sharp focus on disarming enemies and using his own weapons against them. You’ll be using everything from kick to police batons and even rocket launchers as you dispatch your enemies, and the game will gradually introduce new abilities as you progress, allowing you to match up attack combinations with style.

You will also need to use all the skills at your disposal, as the enemies will become dense and fast. With the game set to the “Outlaw Wanted” difficulty, these guys don’t do anything; You will need to be fast, agile and aggressive, as it will only take a few mistakes to get back to the last checkpoint. You can of course lower the difficulty to ‘Gentleman Thief’ for a quieter ride, but we recommend at least starting at the highest setting for a more robust and rewarding experience.

At the end of each chapter, you will come face to face with the boss of the area. On the hardest difficulty setting, these enemies really put your skills and patience to the test, requiring you to use every move at your disposal as you dodge, duck, dive, dive, and dodge multiple projectiles at once. . Be prepared to face them multiple times (at least!), As recognizing their routines and attack patterns is vital to success. Put it this way – you could give some of Metroid Dread’s boss characters a chance.

The Legend of Tianding shines brightest when you are knee deep in its excellent combat. It’s a shame, then, that I insist on spending so a lot of time in other aspects of the game. As each chapter begins, you are introduced to new characters and given context behind what to do (and who to hit in the process). This is fine by itself, but the game spends too much time on this, often asking you to go from one end of the map to the other to simply pick up a key item and bring it back, with multiple interruptions from the NPCs. the way.

Admittedly, it’s a good way to reinforce the already impressive sense of place within Taipei City, but when you just want to have fun with the excellent combat, stopping to hand out money to beggars or buy some meat at a market feels very well. like wasted time. The experience would greatly benefit from a few cuts here and there to improve the overall pace.

Aesthetically, The Legend of Tianding is a pleasantly colorful affair, with anime-style visuals that bring a nice flair to the overall presentation. Unfortunately, the character models are repeated quite frequently throughout the game, but nonetheless, there is a lot of personality in both the friendly NPCs you come across and the myriad enemies. Likewise, the scenes used to close each chapter are designed in the style of traditional manga, with an authentic Taiwanese narrator guiding you through the excellent visuals on display.

From a technical perspective, the game runs at a solid frame rate for the most part, with minor drops during the most intense combat scenes. These are remarkable, to be sure, but they rarely get in the way of an otherwise impressive game. Charge times are equally short, which is certainly a mercy when you’re up against a particularly fierce boss character that requires you to reload your checkpoint multiple times.

conclusion

As a combat experience, The Legend of Tianding lives up to Guacamelee! series, which showcases excellent gameplay that allows you to chain multiple attacks and use your enemies’ weapons against them. However, with different chapters featuring their own standalone missions, the game stubbornly forces you to endure a plethora of setups, with lengthy conversations with NPCs and arduous walks through the central world of Taipei. Trimming this fat would have greatly benefited the overall pace, but keep going and you will be rewarded with one of the most exciting combat experiences we’ve come across in a long time.