There has been an onslaught of quasi kung-fu inspired games, mostly making a homage to the genre in form of a spoof, like Rag Doll Kung Fu and the upcoming Plastic Ninjas (to some extent). Invincible Tiger is another one of those games, and accomplishes most of what it sets out to do.

In Invincible Tiger: The Legend of Han Tao, you assume the role of a kung-fu fighter who battles his way through a myriad of Ninjas and bosses. The whole game has a great feel of 1970′s Bruce Lee kung-fu movies, complete with funny dialogue that has deliberately been dubbed incorrectly, the punch sounds and, of course, classic 1970s Hong Kong music to accompany everything. While Invincible Tiger is a 2D game, it has great 3D backgrounds which add to the mood and setting of the game, and if you happen to have 3D glasses, it’ll even pop out in full 3D mode. It’s also not strictly a 2D scroll game, as you’ll be limited to one “window” or zone at a time, where you have to clear out all enemies before you’re allowed to move on. This is great for focusing action on one place at a time, however, the action in Invincible Tiger can get quite repetitive, which means you can’t just quickly skip places like in most other 2D games by just “running and jumping” to the end; you actually have to finish everything, meaning lots and lots of button mashing.

The combat overall could have been a bit better and more broad, instead, it results to simple button mashing for the most time, with little regard to tactics and actual skills. Granted, this isn’t really the goal of a game like this — kung-fu movies were pretty much the “button mashers” of movies — but we still would have loved to see some more variety in the gameplay. The boss fights however, are quite different and require some skill and strategy to be defeated. The game offers online and offline co-op, which is always recommended for an entertaining arcade game like this, however, keep in mind that you share the lives, so if one of you isn’t as good and keeps dying, it’ll affect both of you.

Technically, the game looks beautiful and the use of 3D backgrounds creates a great atmosphere. The sounds and music could have been directly imported form a 1970′s Hong Kong kunf-fu action movie, which means it’s pretty awesome (if you’re into that kind of thing, of course). The game offers some 4-5 hours of gameplay time, however, most of this time is wasted on the same and repetitive action, which tends to get quite boring after an hour or two. A little more variety would have made wonders for an interesting title like this.

The Good:
Interesting setting
Original
Great 3D backgrounds

The Bad:
Repetitive combat
Controls can be buggy

Overall score: 7/10