Graphics: It’s the classic double edged sword: when you make a game for a system as powerful as the Xbox, you have great freedom in how much detail and graphical glitz you put in, but by the same token everyone’s expectations of even an average release blow triumphs of a year ago out of the water. As a developer faced with this situation, it might be a wise idea to take Bruce Lee: Quest of the Dragon as a cautionary tale of an idea gone all wrong. True, Bruce looks fairly accurate to the martial artist in his prime, and a few of the locations are rather detailed, or exotic or both. The moves are truly the highlight, however, as they are bang on what you’d expect when they manage to animate smoothly.

Therein lies the crux: Getting anything to animate particularly smoothly in Bruce Lee: Quest of the Dragon is a rare occasion indeed. For a title with a smooth frame rate, the action seems incredibly stilted whether it’s one or ten enemies on the screen. Contact animations are a big culprit here, as your eyes simply won’t register whether you hit your foe, missed slightly or were blocked, and the combat comes off incredibly stilted as a result. Further compounding this essential stumbling block are lots of other anomalies, such as levels with invisible barriers that prevent you straying off the beaten path, but do so with no convincing reason. There’s also willful abuse of the few special effects employed in this game. Particles, colored lighting and so forth are virtually non existent, but there’s plenty of the poorest quality lens flares this reviewer has ever encountered, which simply grates that much more. Any of these faults would be forgivable if they weren’t so crippling to the fighting, which requires top-notch indicators of good versus missed hits and crystal-smooth animations to match the standards set even by the Dreamcast, let alone Xbox contemporaries like Dead or Alive 3.

Interface: Chunky block text makes up the majority of the menus in Bruce Lee: Quest of the Dragon, implying that aesthetics weren’t the key concern in their design. A similar problem plagues the on-screen design, which tends to get cluttered with too many toolbars tracking the time limits on various pickups and measuring the health levels of your current target. The latter gauge changes so rapidly that it might as well not be there during the brawl and only appear when tackling boss characters. The rest of the interface is fairly straightforward, allowing you to customize the controls slightly and adjust the volume levels, though that’s hardly worth writing home about by today’s standards.

Gameplay: Let’s cut to the point: a brawler which rarely manages to interpret your commands properly has failed in its primary function as a game. Sadly, Bruce Lee: Quest of the Dragon is plagued by just this problem, and you will spend your time mashing buttons as a result. This is, ultimately, too bad; if you tilt your head a bit and squint hard enough, the outline of a great brawler is visible in this design. There’s tons of moves captured from one of the most unique and cinematic fighting styles every designed, and it’s hard to question the lasting appeal of beating up bad guys in rapid sequence. Battling hordes of ninja-folk has a certain heady air about it as well, and there’s even a bit of RPG driving the development of your character. So where did things go so wrong?

First off, the overly constrictive levels and entirely linear design collapse your experience into something the closely resembles Double Dragon. The enemies attack in such orderly fashion that you always know they’re coming due to a lengthy loading pause before every encounter, and the fights themselves are uninspired battles against single opponents since the others all hang back. The boss characters are predictable and ultimately fairly easy, and this further contributes to a sense of repetition. Paradoxically, following the boss fights, proper strategy even dictates that you sacrifice you own life, further illuminating a weakness in the game’s construction. You see, each level provides you with three lives and allows you to save after defeating the boss. Once you get to the next level, though, you have however many lives you had at the end of the boss fight remaining, and losing your lives means a restart: Ergo, it makes sense to burn your lives at the beginning of each level to restart with a clean set of three for the next gauntlet. Silly.

Had the inputs properly interpreted your moves, though, we could have at least held onto the thrill of dominating fights with Lee’s signature moves, but even that pleasure was denied us. Entering a combo in what feels like identical fashion each time will only succeed in about half the attempts, and trying to find the timing is impossible in an actual combat situation. Further compounding the difficulty is the fact that Bruce begins the game with such a tiny collection of attacks that only the most determined gamer will even get to these higher level moves and combos. In short, the controls cripple what would have been a mediocre fighter at best thanks to laggy load times and uninspired design.

Multiplayer: As Bruce Lee: Quest of the Dragon has no multiplayer mode, this criterion has not been rated.

Sound FX: Perhaps the one criterion that truly pays homage to its source material, the cutscenes are fairly well done and seem to contain lines lifted straight from Lee’s films. Further enhancing the effects are very realistic battle cries as you execute the more exotic moves in Lee’s repertoire. The game lacks any real ambience, and there’s not much variety to be heard in any other aspect of the combat, but there’s enough here to match what we’d expect from the films.

Musical Score: For the most part traditional “fighting” music is employed here, but occasionally the tunes drift away from Eastern influenced background music into harsher metal rock during key battles. This, of course, settles on the ears as dissonant and throws you for a loop when it occurs. Aside from this little anomaly, the music manages to settle in for the ride without ever rearing its head in any way to be memorable.

Intelligence & Difficulty: Having graduated Magna Cum Laude from the Goon’s School for Advanced Tackling Him One At a Time, the enemies you’ll face in Bruce Lee: Quest of the Dragon are snapshots of the foes you’d see Bruce tackle in his films – except slower, and far less entertaining. In the movies, little tricks like timing and quick camera work can make the impossibility of one man standing in a circle of eight foes and emerging victorious seem plausible. Circumstance, skill, and careful manipulation of self-defeating double teams make for exciting cinematography, but unfortunately also make for impossible gameplay. For all that the developers hoped to capture to spirit of the Lee films with this release, the enemies standing around looking threatening gets old quick, but practical limitations of the AI seem to prevent any way of avoiding this problem. Luckily, the boss fights are somewhat more involved, though they too have their foibles, since the boss characters seem fairly predictable and their patterns are easily learned.

Overall: While there are some isolated elements of Bruce Lee: Quest of the Dragon that work, such as the extensive collection of moves and authentic sound effects, they are very tiny islands in a swirling maelstrom of poor gameplay and distressing visuals. As noted earlier, water can flow, or it can crash, but this title proves that water sometimes also needs to be filtered. A few more months of development could have swept away the extensive list of what the politically correct call “areas of opportunity,” since there’s clearly the makings of a good game in there somewhere. The addition of a solid multiplayer mode, perhaps even some cooperative play would have helped, and a definite retooling of the animations and controls could have saved this title. As it stands, we can hope that enough people pick up this game to warrant a sequel that fixes the problems with the original. That seems wishful thinking, though, as there’s no reason why you should part with your cash in its acquisition. Avoid the disappointment and pick up a DVD copy of Enter the Dragon instead.