Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn, the late sequel to an awful fighting game, built on the meme of Shaquille O’Neal born and raised Chinese becoming a master of Kung Fu to fight demons from Hell. Could such a ridiculous setting possibly be any good?
Dropping the classic fighting game aspect, A Legend Reborn assumes a side-scrolling beat ’em up style starring Shaq on his adventure across parts of the world to kill demons disguised as celebrities. The game does not take itself too seriously, or seriously at all, as it embraces its ludicrous nature fully, making for some hilarious one-liners and cutscenes that are practically satirical. Not to mention Shaq himself voices his own character for that extra layer of authenticity.
Despite this, it doesn’t slouch on the gameplay itself. While nothing groundbreaking, it controls well with smooth, steady movement and effective punches and kicks along with a variety of context sensitive attacks that stun enemies. Also at your disposal is the Shaq Smash that uses refillable energy and will unleash a large amount of damage to all surrounding enemies should you happen to get too crowded. Shaq may also utilize dropped weapons that one-hit-kill most enemies in a wide arc around him and are surprisingly satisfying to use. These will break after several hits, however, so they can’t be relied on too heavily.
While the entire game, excluding bosses, involves constantly beating up enemies, it does enough to keep things interesting the whole way through, offering new types of enemies that require unique methods to defeat and sections that stop for you to use certain items to properly defeat your foes and move on.
Bosses are generally average from a purely gameplay standpoint. They each take specific ways to beat them without being too easy or too hard and it isn’t always immediately obvious what you’re supposed to do. With that said they are rather creative and amusing from a subjective standpoint.
The same may be said for the rest of the game as well. It isn’t too hard at any point but some points can take a few tries before getting it right. The biggest issue the game has are waves of enemies that go on just a little too long. It has at least a few times gotten me to the point of bored of being in the same place too long, but it wasn’t long after that the stage moved on to something different. The pacing overall isn’t bad and there weren’t any bugs to speak of except in one single instance in our play time when the game softlocked leaving all on screen characters immobile. Other than that there were no other glitches and a simple checkpoint restart fixed this issue.
Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn does manage to be a fun game even if it’s not breaking any new ground, but really shines in its off-beat dialogue and animated cutscenes that have a great artstyle being clean, colorful, and fluent.
It’s too bad the game itself couldn’t look as great with its slightly muddy textures and odd lighting. Screen tearing was also an issue on consoles. The tearing wasn’t super prevelant, but it was enough to be noticable. While not graphically astounding, the cartoony style compliments the cutscenes injected between levels and gets the job done.
If you enjoy beat ’em ups and stupid, cheesy humor as much as I do, A Legend Reborn is easy to recommend. It was a thoroughly enjoyable experience. It is a relatively short game, but if it were any longer, it may have overstayed its welcome.
