REVIEWED BY STEVEN LOUNG
Double Dragon II: Wander of the Dragons is a terrible game that no self-respecting human being should ever consider playing.
Developed by Gravity and published by Barunson Creative, both Korean game companies, Wander of the Dragons is a full-blown remake of the arcade game Double Dragon II: The Revenge for Xbox Live Arcade.
For those uninitiated, the Double Dragon series of games are beat ‘em ups that were intended to suck quarters from unsuspecting teenagers in the 1980s and, unfortunately, that same philosophy has held true with this new modern rendition of Technos’ 1988 tale of revenge.
‘So just how bad can Wander of the Dragons possibly be’ you might be wondering? Well, considering that a snippet of the game’s XBL description reads as, “This is a remake of “Double Dragon II” a 80’s game. The story line takes same as original game story. However, the graphic, character, action, system, etc. are change.” It isn’t too hard to see just how little care was put into the making of this title when simple localization intricacies, such as a properly translated description, were completely ignored.
That isn’t to say that the game’s descriptive blurb was completely inaccurate since it basically let gamers know what the game is about; however, what it doesn’t tell you is that every feature that was described in the game will make you want to rip your hair out.
Starting with the game’s story – and I use that term very loosely – just like the original, Wander of the Dragons tells a narrative of revenge that sees brothers Billy and Jimmy Lee seeking and kicking the crap out of the bad guys who killed their love interest, Marian.
Of course, no real emotional connection is made to Marian. She is on screen just long enough to be gunned down at the end of the game’s tutorial mission; so, unless you know about the first Double Dragon, you’ll probably end up with a lot of unanswered questions.
Now an admirable attempt was made to tell a story using a series of manga-like comic strips, but the voice-overs were so terrible that the slick art ended up looking ironic in comparison.
As for the actual meat and potatoes of the game itself, everything is almost an entirely broken mess and reeks of problems that were prevalent in the original arcade title.
For one, the game features the same sort of gameplay as the 80′s arcade version. That’s to say, you mash the punch or kick button, wait for enemies to get knocked down, wait for them to get up, and then rinse and repeat. You may find this game very dry, or even boring, if that’s not something you are interested in. On top of that, this game also has some problems involving knocking enemies off the screen and then waiting for them to come back, or understanding if an enemy is above or a little below you.
A new elbow feature was added to the mix and this was implemented to primarily combat a major problem with beat ‘em ups, the issue of enemies getting behind you. The idea was that by simply pressing the elbow button your character would be able to effectively hit an enemy behind him and still continue smacking the one in front of him.
In theory it sounds great, but in practice it just doesn’t work because it seemed to either have spotty collision detection or the hit-box just wasn’t big enough to be used in any meaningful manner.
Looking further at the technical side of things, I didn’t experience any lock ups or game-stopping bugs but I did encounter lots of slowdown – particularly when there were a lot of enemies on screen.
Other than the basic story, the game also has a couple other modes like versus and survival. Versus is exactly as advertised and plays out pretty much identical to versus mode found in the SNES-port of the arcade classic Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles IV: Turtles in Time but with the exception of that game actually being good. The survival mode has you going up against wave-after-wave of enemies like almost every game since Gears of War was released.
Of all the gameplay faults in Double Dragon II: Wander of the Dragons, multiplayer is where it really dropped the ball. As mentioned before, there is a versus mode and there’s also two-player co-op. However, all of this is only done locally with only online leaderboards for the survival and story modes. This is an egregious omission because the game is only remotely fun when you’re playing with someone else and, quite frankly, you’d probably have to bribe your friends and family to convince them to play this game with you on your couch.
Graphically, besides the cool looking cut scenes, this game is really ugly and looks like something that was dragged out of the crypt of 2002. Both technically and artistically this game’s aesthetic fails with ugly textures everywhere, absolutely generic backgrounds and awful-looking character models that would need to be toned down a bunch before you could even call them stereotypes.
Audio-wise, as previously mentioned, the voice acting is a joke; however, the music isn’t offensive but instead just very, very generic rock. The only highlight, if you want to call it one, is that the ending credits feature a remixed version of the original Double Dragon theme. I didn’t think it was as good as the stuff that you’ll find on OC Remix, but it wasn’t bad.
To reiterate what I said at the beginning of the review, Double Dragon II: Wander of the Dragons is a terrible game that no self-respecting human being should ever consider. With that said, do not waste your money by purchasing this game.
Score: 0.5/10