– Advertisement –
3D Action/Adventure Platformer is a genre with a number of standout franchises under its belt. From Tomb Raider to Uncharted, Mario 3D World to Psychonauts, there is no shortage of delicacies on offer should you wish to indulge in this particular buffet. However, once all the good stuff is gone, The Crown of Wu remains.
To say this game is flawed is tantamount to claiming that space is a bit big, the ocean is a tad wet, or The Flash’s ropey CGI is only slightly off-putting. Within minutes of firing up The Crown of Wu for the first time, I knew this would be a happy experience for me.
Before I get too bogged down in negativity as I am usually wont to do, I’ll try and set the scene and give a few positives if I can. No promises.
The Crown of Wu has you playing as the titular Wu, an evolved form of ape-like creature not unlike those found in Planet of the Apes, only slightly more Feudal Japan-ish. You awake after an indeterminant amount of time imprisoned for vague reasons and in the meantime, everything has gone awry. You are tasked, by another ape seemingly speaking a dialect of Simlish, with regaining your powers (?) and fixing the mess you see in front of you.
So off you go, jumping, sprinting, climbing, all that good platformer stuff, with a bit of combat thrown in. The game attempts to guide you in these early stages by using on-screen button prompts, however, often you’ll find that nothing happens when you hit the button in question as the hitbox for the prompt is actually bigger than the hitbox for the command, which as you can imagine is infuriating.
One positive is the environments The Crown of Wu places you in, I’ve no idea why you’re flinging yourself between floating islands covered with glowing crystals and faceless enemies but as a still image it looks very cool. And whilst Wu usually moves like a man on a multi-directional treadmill, when he climbs to the top of a wall, he does a little flip to ascend the final few feet which is also very cool.
Alright, I’m out.
There is so much wrong with this game. You are literally dumped into a world gone wrong, but not in a compelling way because I have no idea what it looked like before because you’ve made my character an ape. I’ve no idea what an ape society might look like. To me, this could be totally normal. If you’re going to have the plot of the game uncovered as a mystery disaster, at least give some idea of what is actually wrong with the world.
Most games that attempt this are either based in our reality so we can see the differences immediately or have a pre-disaster portion of the game that sets the stage for our investigation later on. This does neither, and so, I don’t particularly care that things have gone bad.
As mentioned above, Wu doesn’t look like he’s fully connected with the world around him, instead of climbing a wall, it looks like he’s doing a climbing animation whilst the camera pans up. Jumping feels fine but running around feels as though I’m on ice with no real physics to my movements.
Combat is ok I suppose but some mad button mapping makes it unintuitive and the tiny tutorial at the start of the game doesn’t help much. To heal you must hold L2 and Triangle, but you may not move as you do, perfect for boss fights, don’t you agree? The regular attack is Square, but the strong attack is L1 + Square. The whole thing feels like it was built by someone who’s never held a controller before.
The worst of all is the prompts from your guide that do essentially nothing to clear up any issues you may have. He’ll say something like, this enemy has a shield, there must be something nearby that can deal with it. You don’t say, buddy. Or he’ll say fire a wind blast at those fans, you do so, and nothing obvious happens and the game moves on. Just a maddening lack of game design that makes me feel as though this was added in later as QA feedback was that it wasn’t clear what to do so they reluctantly stapled this on top.
In the course of writing this review, I’ve learned that Red Mountain Studio, the developers of this game are a very small team and that might explain some of the oversights, but this is not a fun experience and honestly feels like it could have come out on the PS2.
