
When I bought my Xbox 360, many years ago now, it came with three free games: Saint’s Row, Lego Indiana Jones, and Kung Fu Panda. Apparently they wanted to appeal to both the family market and the white-people-who-enjoy-games-full-of-the-N-word market. I tried Saint’s Row a while back and DNFed it pretty quickly. I was expecting Kung Fu Panda to be a speedy DNF as well. I’ve never seen the movie it’s based on, and my recent experiences in dealing with my game backlog have taught me that movie tie-in games are rarely any good.
This one, though? It’s really not bad! It’s extremely short and not exactly challenging, but I don’t necessarily think that’s such a terrible thing for a game that’s largely aimed at kids. I had a major case of pandemic brain when playing it, and it felt like the ideal game to pick up in that kind of situation—when you want something to occupy you but not to be taxing in any real way. I picture myself replaying it in the future when I’m stuck on the couch with a bad head cold.
As I said, this is not a long game. I finished it in around five hours of game play, and that’s with getting the 100% achievements for most of the levels. In the single player campaign, there aren’t many options for extending the length; the action is generally very railroaded, so it’s not like you can head off and explore for hours on end. There’s a reasonable amount of variety for the short length, however. You mostly play as Po, but there are also sections where you take control of other characters, who have different skill sets. Shifu, for example, has a cloud jumping ability, which is fun until you forget to hit the jump button and go crashing to your doom. A less successful game play element involves pressing specific buttons within a short time frame in order to execute fancy moves. I’m never a huge fan of that, but I’m even less of a fan when it happens with no warning in the middle of a seemingly normal fight.
On the whole, the cameras and controls were good for a game of this age. It allowed me to change the camera controls to the modern directions, but there was no way to alter the vertical movement in the one brief flying scene, which was unfortunate for both me as a player and for the characters I kept crashing into lightning bolts in consequence.
The voice acting might feel a bit strange to a player familiar with the film cast, but for me it generally worked quite well. Visually, it was good for a game of its age, which is probably helped by the lack of human characters.
All-up, Kung Fu Panda proved to be one of the pleasant surprises of my backlog adventure. It’s a solid family-oriented game with a mix of platforming and fighting elements that are entertaining in a non-demanding way.