A poor fighting game but it has some charm.
Shaq Fu is a poor fighting game because the characters are greatly unbalanced and many of the special moves are useless because your character will be hit before he/she can perform them or the special move will do only slightly more damage than a normal attack while being much harder to execute.
On the harder difficulty levels,the AI is very cheap and on the easier difficulty levels you can easily defeat any opponent with basic attacks,so the game lacks balance in difficulty too.
Some of the character ideas are creative,such as how one of the characters is a cyborg who can extent his limbs,shoots a gun and missles and can rocket propell himself high in the air or across distances quickly.Another character is a little boy or girl(I can't quite remember)who can immobilize you with green energy.The other characters include an arabian swords expert.A green skinned,hooded creature who can shoot electricity/lightning.A savage creature that looks like it can tear you to shreds with it's claws and it can breathe fire.A mummy.A cat lady who's very agile.And Shaq himself who can throw shurikens and can do some sort of kick attack where his leg is on fire.
The special moves might sound okay in theory but in reality the cheap AI,lack of character balance and unresponsive controls make these ideas go to waste.For example,when Shaq tries to throw a Shuriken he will take a second or two to wind up his arm back to be able to throw the Shuriken which allows him to beat hit by an enemy attack before he can do so.His fire fury kick special move does only slightly more damage than a regular kick and requires a delicate 180 degree D-Pad motion and button press to perform it and it doesn't even work half of the time.
Even though the characters maneuver smoothly during battle,the combination of the problems I've mentioned above ruin the gameplay.
The game has a story mode and an arcade style mode.The story mode shows more story scenes and you can only use Shaq.The arcade style mode allows you to use any character.
The story is about how Shaq is supposed to attend charity basketball game in Tokyo,Japan and he ends up in another dimension.
The game has a little bit of funny dialogue,such as when Shaq tells the old man character ''hey old man,you want me to rock your chair'' ? and the old man says ''you have much to learn young man''.The story mode uses scenes to tell a story that mixes martial arts,basketball,fantasy in a charming way.
The graphics for the game are quite colorful too.
But in terms of gameplay,the game is terrible.