Game: Tournament of Legends
Platform: Wii
Publisher: Sega
Developer: High Voltage
ESRB: T
Genre: 3D fighting
Players: 1-2
What's Hot: Interesting character designs, supports classic controller
What's Not: Unresponsive controls, annoying voice acting, no combat rhythm, muddy visuals
Review by: Brandon "Thanatos" Cackowski-Schnell
Back in the arcades of my youth, you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting some Street Fighter or Motal Kombat clone that was trying to cash in on the popularity of those fighting games but didn't have the chops to be anything more than a pale imitation at best and a quarter sucking flim-flam job at worst. With its unresponsive controls and complete lack of combat rhythm, Tournament of Legends could easily fit alongside many of those cruddy come and go fighters. The only difference is that this time you'll be suckered out of thirty bucks rather than two bits.
Like all good fighters, there's a story to this game, or at least a reason for all of these strange looking beings to be knocking around each other in the ring. In this case there's some mumbo jumbo about gods disappearing and other gods trying to take over and a dude with a crow's head. If you need a story for your fighting games, the one you'll find here isn't bad, and each fighter has their own backstory complete with comic book style static images used to portray it. The characters themselves are well designed and come from a variety of cultures and have a variety of weapons and magical powers you can equip prior to stepping into the ring. As a nice touch as you progress through the various fighters you'll unlock more weapon sets and enchantments to use with subsequent fighters, it's just a shame that there doesn't seem to be any discernible difference when using them.
Which brings us to the main problem with the game, namely that the combat is completely unsatisfying. The controls are unresponsive regardless of which controller you decide to use, however I do appreciate the option to use the classic controller. The fighting engine is clearly meant to support more defensive postures as the motion controls used by default tend to discourage button mashing, however the small size of the arenas combined with the dodginess of blocking and dodging makes it difficult to sidestep and counter and use the most of your defensive abilities. On top of this there are certain attacks that are completely unbalanced as they're either unblockable when used by the AI or cover the entire ring leaving you with nowhere to go and no way to stop them. The characters have different sizes which implies that you'd play them differently however in the end they all play pretty much the same. The quick move and poke actions you'd expect from the small classes don't work any better than wading in and swinging with the big bruisers.
In addition to the cruddy fighting mechanics, the game tasks you with minigames used to recapture some of your health should you be downed. Each bout has a time limit placed on it and three lives to separate from your opponent. As you down your opponent, or get downed you'll shake, waggle and roll your way to getting more health or taunting your enemies with some truly atrocious voice acting. The problem is that some of the times these motions work and some of the time they don't but it doesn't seem to make a difference to how the game plays out either way. If you can't completely defeat your opponent before the time runs out you'll be given the chance to play more minigames in between rounds to get more health back or repair your armor in the Wii equivalent of patting your head and rubbing your stomach. At least this mini-game actually works even if you feel like an idiot while doing it.
The mini-games while interesting from the standpoint of giving you the ability to get some health and armor back completely remove you from the flow of the combat, as do the mid-bout entrances of various mythical creatures. During your fight you'll be visited by large environmental beasties and your and your opponent will stand shoulder to shoulder and have to follow the quicktime event prompt to dodge the environmental attack or lose more health in the process. I can see what they were trying to do here but in practice it fails completely. Had there been a way to risk injuring yourself in an attempt to cause the AI to be gravely injured by the attack I'd see some value in it, but as it stands, it's just one more way to lose some health at the hands of the unresponsive controls and takes you out of whatever meager rhythm the combat holds.
Once you've gone through the fighters' stories and unlocked the two additional fighters there's not much else to do. The game has no online component and the practice mode doesn't offer anything more than a video and then an opponent that doesn't take damage. There are no move lists to practice from, no proper training mode at all to help you learn the ins and outs of the various characters should you even want to master the different move sets. The game doesn't even look very good with bad textures and an overlying muddy sheen so the draw of playing a visually arresting game isn't even there.
Once upon a time this game was called Gladiator AD and was supposed to be a 3rd person brawler following the story of a gladiator as he cut a bloody swath through opponents and his moral 'kill or spare' decisions followed him around, to help or hinder his story. That game would have been interesting to play but that game is lost to the sands of time, no doubt soon to be followed by this bland excuse for a fighter. The bargain price may tempt you to give the game a try but trust me, it's no different than the shuckster me-too fighting games of 15 years ago only this time you'll be losing a lot more than just a quarter.
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