Jackie Chan Adventures

Screenshots

Notes

Jackie Chan Adventures is a side scrolling beat em up in the style of classic games like River City Ransom or Streets of Rage. It's based on an early 2000s cartoon named (guess what) Jackie Chan Adventures.

I have somewhat fond memories of the cartoon, but never played the game.



The story more or less follows the story of the cartoon. Bad guys from an organisation called the Dark Hand are attempting to find magic scrolls to resurrect their demon master Shendu. A fictionalised Jackie Chan, archaeologist who does some work on the side for a shady government organisation called Section 13, gets embroiled in their plot after they raid his uncle's antique shop and must stop them by finding the scrolls first. Most of the characters from the show are in the game, although some (mostly Jackie's family and allies) only appear in dialog. Oddly absent is Tohru, one of the major characters who starts as a villain and eventually becomes a good guy in the show.

The gameplay isn't great. Although you can do a few different combos, I eventually figured out that the most efficient strategy is just to use the quick jab continually. All enemies get knocked over after 3 hits and take a few knockouts to kill, and I didn't notice any attacks being particularly effective. The quick jab just hits quickest so there's the least chance of enemies hitting you first. Most of the skill comes in avoiding getting surrounded as you can get stunlocked indefinitely, particularly by the ninja enemies. Jackie Chan's fighting style revolves around fluidly improvising with the environment and objects to fight for comedic effect. You *can* pick up items and fight with them, but it's very slow and doesn't noticeably do any more damage than normal attacks, so I didn't bother much.


You fight waves of the same 3 enemy types (normal goons, big goons, ninjas), and are forced to finish each fight before you can move on in the stage.

You can walk up and down (towards and away from the screen) as well as left and right, but it's really hard to judge distance on this axis. This means you can end up just whiffing your punches. This is particularly bad against bosses who look big but are deceptively hard to hit, and can attack you in wider ranges. The worst part though, is that double tapping a direction does a flip and is very sensitive. This, combined with the fact that an up/down input seems not to register sometimes, means that it's very easy to accidentally do a flip up or down, which will carry you over a handrail to instant death in a pit. This was very frustrating.

You start with 3 lives and losing them means restarting the stage, which can be a long time if you die on a boss. There are slots that imply you could get more lives somehow but I never found any. Later levels have light platforming elements, but this mainly leads to accidental deaths from pits during fights and lots of frustration.

Bosses are pretty boring. Humanoid bosses can be easily beaten by just blocking until they attack and then throwing a jab before blocking again. More monstrous enemies only have one attack, so it's just a case of learning to dodge that one attack and wearing them down. The exception is the final boss who has multiple attacks and spawns infinite ninjas. This is mostly an endurance test.

The obvious comparison for me is Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Both licensed titles, both beat em ups (with slightly different gameplay). But while TMNT was kind of fun if uninspired, Jackie Chan just slips into being repetitive and annoying.