Takes ideas from Spider-Man: Web of Shadows and transferred it to a fat Panda. And the result is quite impressive.
Activision has a habit of creating movie based games, most of which are mediocre at best. However, quite a number of gamers were impressed with what they have done with the latest Spider-man game. That I believe gave them the idea to transfer pretty much the other title's good points to their second Kung Fu Panda game, Legendary Warriors.
The game starts with a slideshow based story wherein the entire furious five with the exception of Tigress has gone missing. And it's up to Po and Tigress to rescue them. You will then start the game with a quite effective tutorial that is mixed with automatic pop-ups and scrolls floating on the map that you can read for information on how to play the game. Anyone who was able to play Web of Shadows should feel pretty much right at home with this one. At first you'll only be able to perform basic moves like light and heavy attacks, belly flop (to stun the enemy), block, etc. But as you progress through the game, you'll be able to unlock additional combo moves, grabbing and throwing of items/enemies, and even the ability to switch to Tigress (and probably use the other characters on the later part of the game). The ability to experiment and even do your own combos is quite an enjoyable experience. There are stages wherein you can just ignore and walk away from bad guys, but on later stages, bamboos are going to block your path and you'll be forced to kill all the enemies first to proceed.
You can also manipulate the environment with the use of your touchscreen, like setting up a catapult for Po to ride on to. This however doesn't force you to take out the stylus, because using your bare fingers does the job quite nicely.
The game also gives you quite a generous amount of health bar that you can refill by holding down the R button, which makes Po sit on the floor and munch on noodles. As bad as reading that you'll be able to heal anywhere you want, you cannot actually perform that move anytime you want especially when you're trap surrounded by enemies. And since the game doesn't have any save points, if you die, you have to restart the level from the beginning. Falling however will just cause your character to respawn and eat up all your "blue bar". Which by the way can be filled by breaking objects and killing enemies. That's the game's way of encouraging you to keep on fighting because the more blue bars you have, the more bonuses like extra damage you'll get. While getting hit or not being able to kill enemies for a long period of time will slowly eat up your blue bar multiplier.
The game's graphics looks better than the previous release. But that came at a price because there's performance issues with the game when multiple enemies spawn and gets displayed at the same time. That in turn switches the game into a slow-motion looking fight scene, but should be tolerable to most people.
The sound on the other hand is pretty basic. You'll get the usual grunts from Po while duking it out with an enemy. While the sound effects are quite accurate and convincing. There are however no VOs on this game.
The controls is similar to Web of Shadows. You can perfrom combos through experimentation or using the ones that are given to you. The addition of a few touchscreen controls doesn't feel awkward and doesn't take any fun out of the game. There are however special moves that will require you to draw on the screen. That might force you to pull-out your stylus, but unless you're in real trouble and need to kill every one on the screen. You wouldn't need to execute the said move.
If you have enjoyed Web of Shadows and feel like playing through it again, you couldn't go wrong if you try and give this title a shot instead. It might not be as challenging as Spider-man in terms of environmental obstacles and puzzles, but the rest of the elements that made Web of Shadows fun to play remained intact. The game might not offer anything new to the genre and might even give those like me who already played Web of Shadows a "been there, done that" feeling. But that still doesn't prevent the game from being enjoyable, maybe even more to those who haven't tried Web of Shadows before. Having said that I'm giving the game a 7.0
.:My reviews are only as good as everyone else's. Take every single one of them with a grain of salt:.