Xiaolin Showdown (PS2) (gamespy)

- gamespy -

For whatever reason, the multiplayer party-game genre is one that is exceptionally easy to mess up. The corpses of poor efforts like Sonic Shuffle, Whacked!, and Pac-Man Fever lie buried and forgotten in the graveyards of gaming history. Even genre stalwart Mario Party has had some severe missteps every now and then.

The packaging of Xiaolin Showdown makes you expect a fighting-based action/adventure game. The game itself, in contrast, wants you to think it's a multiplayer fighting game in the vein of Power Stone. It's all bunk. It might lack a board, but the mindless melee fighting, item collect-a-thons, and extraneous mini-games place this one firmly in party game territory. And, like most party games, this one's about as enjoyable as finding a special surprise in the punch bowl.

The game's setup is as follows: Players choose a character and equip them with up to three Shen Gong Wu artifacts they have bought or earned. They're all thrown into a fixed-camera 3D-ish arena of some sort, where they can run, jump, pick things up, and proceed to beat the living daylights out of each other. Pounding on the other players robs them of shiny colored orbs that do... something. I'm still not sure what. Well, anyhow, every few minutes or so, a piece of a legendary scroll will appear, along with some enemies to beat up. Players compete to see who can grab the scroll piece first. In between the scroll appearances, a familiar series villain may show up to deliver some "witty" dialogue and send some more enemies onto the playing field. On occasion, a bonus-stage marker might pop onto the field, taking you to a 2D stage where you grab as much loot as possible before time runs out. After three scroll pieces have been gathered, a Shen Gong Wu artifact appears, and all the players are taken to a mini-game to compete for it. These mini-games feature unique and original concepts such as "Tag" and "Keep Away." Once that's done and over with, players are given whatever items they may have won during the fight, along with experience points based on their performance. As you earn more experience points, your fighter's abilities improve.

Doesn't sound horribly exciting, does it? Amazingly enough, the execution is actually worse than the description might lead you to believe.

Let's start with the basic controls. You have fighters that allegedly have different sizes, strengths and fighting styles, but when you're controlling them, they all feel exactly the same. Every fighter has several different combos, none of which are particularly more effective than just mashing the square button like there's no tomorrow. There's a charged power attack, too, but it takes such a long time to execute that it's almost impossible to not get hit while you're powering up. Want to aim for a specific target? You'll need to use the right analog stick for that -- and you need to press it in the direction of the specific player or enemy you want to target. But if there's more than one enemy or player in that general direction, odds are you'll wind up locking on to the wrong target.

The base gameplay is equally lacking. The main appeal of party games is that they offer fast-paced, exciting competitions for a group of players. Xiaolin Showdown, while it follows much of the party game formula, is about as far from fast-paced and exciting as you can get. The fights themselves are incredibly drawn-out affairs, with a long, long wait between each of the scroll pieces appearing on the battlefield. During that time, you're stuck doing nothing but beating up on the other players in order to collect shiny orb thingamabobs. (I still can't tell what they're supposed to do, and the game's documentation and tutorials fail to elaborate on them. I know one orb type charges up your special item power, but that's about it.)

Every so often you'll wind up fighting a large enemy, usually a robot or some sort of spirit-monster, who can be easily taken down by pounding the attack button until they're dead. Or, if you prefer, you can just let the other characters beat on it while you go off to make a sandwich or something. Don't worry about taking damage unless you're aiming for points, since none of your fighters can actually be knocked out, no matter how badly they get smacked around. Knowing that kind of makes the whole game seem pointless, doesn't it? Still, things like the amount of beatdown you administer do affect your ranking, and will earn you points at the end of the stage. Too bad you won't have any idea how well you performed until then, because the game completely lacks an HUD in the fighting sequences. And forget about having fun with the levels themselves or the Shen Gong Wu artifacts you can use -- the backgrounds are severely lacking in the way of interesting settings and field hazards, and many of the artifacts have very similar effects. The game's high point comes at the end-of-level Showdown mini-games, which are considerably more enjoyable than the fight-a-thon preceding them, but even these drag on for far too long.

It seems like an afterthought to mention the sound and graphics at this point, since even a fantastic audiovisual presentation wouldn't be able to salvage this train wreck, but it should come as no surprise that they're pretty mediocre. The music's totally forgettable, but it's worth noting that the game does feature many voiceovers by the original voice actors from the cartoon. The graphics have a simple, heavy-lined look to them that also mimics much of the feel and setting of the original show. Still, the fact that the only really noticeable graphical difference between the PS2 and the PSP versions of Xiaolin Showdown is the frame rate does not say much for the technical quality of the game's visuals.

Xiaolin Showdown had some potential, I'm sure, but almost every aspect of the game seems so poorly thought out that it's hard to find much positive to say about it. The presentation is passable, but the gameplay itself is an exercise in pure tedium. The pervasive sense of overwhelming boredom is what really kills it, since a competitive, group-oriented game should ideally be the exact opposite of digital Ambien. I'd imagine that even the younguns that this title is aimed towards would get sick of it very quickly -- a familiar license can only go so far, after all. If this game were an actual party, it'd be a shindig thrown by your high school pre-calculus teacher. Avoid.