Jade Empire vs Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn
Jade Empire
Jade Empire is a martial arts-themed action RPG where you get the freedom to choose to become either a noble hero or a treacherous villain. The game also provides you with a vast open world to explore and a host of interesting characters to interact with. As you play an aspiring martial arts master, you'll have access to a wide range of nicely-animated fighting moves and styles that you can mix and match. While you increase in your proficiency of the martial arts, your enemies' difficulty level will scale up accoridngly as well, so every battle you engage in will be as challenging as the next despite having better gear and skills.However, being a rather old game, the combat sequences may feel a bit choppy and awkward today. The graphics looks weathered as well. And if you want to play this game for its story, you might want to reconsider. Jade Empire is famous for mainly its cool moves and well-made combat system back then, and having a completely original and immersive plot isn't one of the selling points.
That said, there isn't a lot of oriental-themed RPGs out there and Jade Empire happens to be one of the best ones. If you love martial art games, you might want to try this game out.
Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn
Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn is a fun and hilarious beat 'em up game that takes quite vicious, satirical jabs at various pop culture, celebrities, people stereotypes, and even the developers' own indiegogo campaign. The game starts you off in China where Shaquille (Shaq for short), a black baby was raised in a small village in China after he was found drifting down the river in an expensive-looking handbag. He was naturally bullied by the local kids when he was little because he was so much taller than they all were but his taller and bigger stature helped him gained the mentorship of the local village elder and he was eventually trained in the ancient martial arts of Wu Xing. Sounds like a the generic start of a kung-fu story, right? Well, the game does it so much better by peppering it with plenty of humor.Anyway, one day, his fighting skills were called into action when the god of death, Yen Lo-Wang, once again escape from the underworld and unleashed his plan to take over the world... that is by possessing various celebrities with his demons and brainwashing the world's people into subservience. Of course, this is not something Shaq will simply ignore, especially not when his elderly mentor was murdered by one of Yen Lo-Wang's minions.
Now, the gameplay in this game isn't what you'd call "hardcore", but the boss fights are quite challenging and the enemies you go fist-to-fist against have their respective sets of abilities in which you'll need to find ways to counter, besides being downright amusing. Just look at the animations! Controls are very simple to get into, especially if you had played such beat 'em ups before, and it's really nice that the developers put in the extra effort to vary their range of enemies and background art.
The best parts about the game though, aside from the funny dialogues and the cool moves, include crazy fun power-ups that can turn Shaq into a spikes-spewing cactus-man or equip him with an Iron Man-like suit, albeit a suit that is powered by diesel, which allow him to dish out a flurry of fists to any enemy unlucky enough to be standing in his way!
Shaq Fu: A Legend Reborn's brand of humor may not be everyone's cup of tea, but if you enjoy beat 'em up games, and you like to see the amusing side of things and you don't take the world too seriously, then this game is definitely right up your alley. It'll be able to make you cough up a chuckle or two, at least - I daresay I laughed a bit too much at some of the jokes in this game. Oh and a quick tip if you will - make sure you listen closely to the lyrics in the game's very own theme song. I got my first chuckle from it!