THE LEGEND OF TIANDING GAMEPLAY UPGRADE

It’s also a game that unfortunately doesn’t fully respect players’ time, stubbornly refraining from showing their best at frequent intervals. It’s a wonderfully authentic shot with locations that feel incredibly live with bustling streets and tall, imposing structures lining the roads. In The Legend of Tianding, you are thrown onto the streets of Taipei, the capital of Taiwan, in the early 20th century as the legendary outlaw Liao Tianding. Pair that game feeling with the brilliantly realised comic book visual style and you’ve got a real winner on your hands.It is always a pleasure to see an underrepresented culture or time period in video games. The thing I love about the game is so hard to get across in words, but it’s the feel of the game – how well the combat and platforming are built to be smooth and intuitive. The Legend of Tianding is one of those games that I had no expectations for going in but completely blew me away. Once you start thinking about joining the fantastic platforming into your smooth as hell attack combos you’ll get a real feeling for the potential on offer in The Legend of Tianding. The worst thing about the game is knowing there are 12-year-olds on YouTube doing just that while I can barely couple together two attacks. There is a potential here for some seriously powerful combos of attacks that’ll stop your enemies from getting a hit in and mean you never touch the floor. But that’s not all, the game slowly introduces you to new attacks and upgrades that you can add into your combos, making you feel like a serious kung fu badass. Even with just these two attacks, the game feels amazing, allowing you to combo attacks, throws and weapon changes to juggle a mass of enemies in a buttery smooth dance.

THE LEGEND OF TIANDING GAMEPLAY UPGRADE

This does a fair amount of damage but also causes the enemy to drop their weapon which you can pick up for a significant damage upgrade from your basic weapon, with my personal favourite being a war axe arrangement like Thor’s Stormbreaker only with less lightning and more pummelling enemies in the face. Once you’ve weakened an enemy you can press a button to wrap them in ribbons and throw them in a direction of your choosing. To start with you just have a simple attack that you can mash to your heart’s content, but the game quickly introduces you to its disarm move.

It’s a hop, skip and jump into a combat situation. Once you’ve had some time to master the platforming, The Legend of Tianding introduces you to the next set of gameplay. Before long you’ll be flinging yourself around the map with no difficulties, jumping off a platform, rappelling onto another and dodging through the spikes in your path. The platforming feels tactile and satisfying and there is a perfectly positioned range of moves – more than your simple run and jump in a Mario but less than the complex behemoth of Mirror’s Edge. As far as I can tell the platforming controls aren’t added to through the game so the tutorial sets you up nicely. It’s just a case of ‘here’s everything you need to know, now go and play the game’. This is introduced to you through a super quick and simple tutorial that shows you all the types of jumps, rappelling and dodging without any unnecessary faff. The first bit of gameplay that you’re let loose with is the platforming. Once you pick your jaw up off the floor and recover from the visuals, it’s time to pick up the controller and deal with the pesky necessity of playing the game. Every screenshot I’ve taken looks hand-drawn and wouldn’t feel out of place in any manga – in fact, for all I know every frame has been lifted directly from a Naruto or a Sailor Moon. I’m no artist so I’m painfully restricted in the language I can use to describe how nice this game looks, but it’s got the comic pane borders, the dotty colouring in and the pop-up picture-in-picture that sell the whole effect. There is a lot of hidden beauty in The Legend of Tianding but the most beautiful beauty is very much worn on the game’s sleeve with the aesthetics on display from the very first frame. It metaphorically roundhouse kicks you in the face with how gorgeously comic book-ey it is.

The first thing you’ll notice on booting up The Legend of Tianding is the art style. You might even learn something about the Japanese rule of Taiwan along the way. As an outlaw you will rise up against the Japanese ruling classes, rob from the rich, give to the poor and do an awful lot of kung fu fighting. As Liao, you will explore the streets of Colonial Japanese Taiwan, all rendered in a dazzling comic book/manga art style.

The Legend of Tianding is a comic book-styled action-platformer hack-and-slash where you play as Liao Tian-Ding, the legendary Taiwanese folk hero, or if you’re as uncultured as I am, a sort-of Taiwanese Robin Hood figure.

The legend of tianding gameplay