Thank you Oasis Games for sending us this game to review!

In Hidden Dragon: Legend, Lu finds himself in a puddle of blood, laying half-dead with bodies strewn about everywhere. He doesn’t know where he is or what happened. He drags himself up, and makes it outside. Once he’s out there, he finds enemy martial artists who are trying to stop him. He successfully fights them off, and passes out soon thereafter. A kind woman and her father take him in so that he can recuperate. Unfortunately, not too long after this, members of the same martial arts clan show up and kill the people who showed him such kindness. At this point, he promises to take revenge and to figure out why these people want him so badly.

Hidden Dragon: Legend is a 2.5D action-platformer game where the entire game world is rendered in quite impressive looking 3D using the Unreal engine, and the gameplay takes place in a sidescrolling manner, completely 2D. That is where the term ‘2.5D’ comes from. The first time I launched this game I was blown away with how good it looked. Sure, it’s not as pretty as some of the best games with multi-million dollar budgets, but for independent game developers out of China? Very impressive. Not only that, but its voice acting is in three different languages (Chinese, Japanese, and English) with a great musical score to boot. (The default is actually English interface with Chinese voices, but you can change that in the options.) To say this game is impressive for an indie studio would be an understatement.

Once you get your bearings and begin to chase down The Organization (which is what the enemy martial artists’ group calls themselves), you pick up a sword, and later a dagger, and start pounding them into smithereens. It turns out that Lu was a martial arts master, who has extraordinary powers (which would venture into spoiler territory to explain). He has passive stat boosts called Sutras, active skills which are activated with button presses (and cost skill points to use), and combos that can be upgraded or unlocked. Red soul stones are used to unlock the skills above, and blue soul stones are used to buy potions, which you will definitely need lots and lots of.

Enemies can be quite challenging, though mostly because of their massive hit point pools. Thankfully, you do get some pretty great combos which really helps tear down enemies, even if it does take a whole bunch of attacks to get them to finally die. The animations, the special effects of the attacks, and so on are incredibly smooth and look and feel fantastic. The button press timings are very generous, as you can quickly press the entire combo early, and watch it happen, which is really great. It’s a lot of fun to play, though the large hit point pools of the enemies does detract from what is otherwise a ton of fun to play.

My biggest complaint, other than the large enemy health pools, is that there are a couple of really frustrating segments. In one area, there is an elevator where you can throw enemies off of the side to kill them. That’s great and all, but I died probably at least thirty times on this stupid elevator... it was not a good time. There was another section with an instant-kill boulder, but I did finally figure that out. Overall, the level design is actually deceptively good with tons and tons of hidden secrets everywhere. It’s unfortunate that there are no indicators of whether or not you missed anything, though. You can replay a level as many times as you want, but you have no idea whether or not you should. Given the weapons and Sutra fragments that I am missing, I probably need to replay some levels, but I don’t know where to begin looking.

When you beat the game, harder difficulties unlock. Your character still has all of the skills and equipment from the previous playthrough, but newer, stronger weapons and Sutras become available to find throughout the levels. It’s great, and a nice incentive to keep going through this roughly five hour adventure. It’s just a shame that you really don’t know where you missed things, per my previous complaint. Also, several of the terms used in the menu screens are not defined at all. Even after beating the game, I have no idea what impact GBP or DRP have, or what a Breakthrough does on your Sutras.

Morally, it has a lot of violence, along with a significant amount of blood. You beat up human members of The Organization, so it comes with the territory there. *spoilers* Yourself and others were subject to human experiments that drove most people crazy, but gave them a lot of power as a result. These experiments include magic potions that came from an evil power. *end spoilers* The word ‘Hell’ is used to describe a difficulty level, but otherwise I did not note any other foul language.

Hidden Dragon: Legend surprised me in how much they did right. Great action, very good graphics, and overall fun. Despite some significant flaws, I found the game quite entertaining for the roughly seven hours I spent playing it. It’s a fair value at the price offered, and a bargain on sale. I just hope you have better luck than I did dealing with those few frustrating levels I got stuck in.