This is a game that’s clearly designed for the suburbs, with large, spacious living rooms. Like any Kinect game, or any Move game for that matter, Kung Fu Live is fairly demanding of its environmental requirements. So far, so good, it’s your basic fighter. It’s all done in a hokey, tongue-in-cheek style that pushes players from one 2D fight to the next, using various combos of your own invention to fight the waves of bad guys that take you on as you progress through the story. While there, you get sucked into a comic book world, learn Kung Fu, and then find yourself in a conspiracy to take possession of an ancient painting in possession of your surly employer. The premise of the game is that you have been recently employed to work at an old comic book store in Chinatown.
The premise is intriguing, and the presentation is deliberately cheesy and B-Movie in its tone and presentation, but when you take the trimmings and frills away, what you’re left with is a game that fails to entertain due to significant technical shortcomings. It’s essentially a Kinect game on the Sony console, asking players to stand in front of the camera, get scanned into the game, pose for static comic book panel cutscenes and move around for actual fighting. Kung Fu Live is a brave attempt at bringing something different to the Playstation Eye.
