Review for Monkey King: Hero Is Back. Game for PC and PlayStation 4, the video game was released on 17/10/2019
It is a Chinese proverb to remind us: the greatest knowledge we can have is to know the limits of our ignorance, and this could apparently be one of the concepts behind the creation of Monkey King: Hero Is Back, originally a 2015 animated film costing $ 19 million and absurd collection of 153 million dollars, and now video game, developed by HEXADRIVE INC. and published by Oasis Games under the umbrella of THQ Nordic.
It all starts with Sun wukong, the Monkey God, immortal and in the fullest of his powers but, as the adage teaches us, absolute power corrupts absolutely, and the great saint goes too far precisely in his quest for ever greater power, to the point of arousing the wrath of the whole K'uen-luen.
No one can stand up to him, and many fall by his hand before the Buddha himself stops him and, unable to kill him because of his immortality, condemns him to imprisonment inside a huge block of stone.
Sun Wukong's forced exile is accidentally interrupted later 500 years, when the very young aspiring monk Liuer awakens him by mistake while he is on the run from the monsters that have attacked his village. Unaware of the chains that encircle his wrists and limit his powers, gift and punishment from the Buddha for his insolence, Sun Wukong will find himself having to save the little one Liuer with the only help of punches and kicks, deprived of the powers that only 500 years ago he took so for granted.
His will be a growth path, step by step towards a more humble and altruistic self, perhaps more inclined to the disinterested help of those who, unlike him, do not have the power to defend themselves.
Yes, the story has something familiar, and the reason for it is quickly identified: the origin of the story and part of its protagonists is in fact the 西遊記, literally "The story of the journey to the West", a timeless classic of Chinese literature published around 1590 and tendentially attributed to the hand of the scholar Wú Chéng'ēn. Monkey King: Hero is Back takes from this text (already a source of inspiration, among other things, of Dragon Ball) the idea of a real path of purification for the various characters, in particular for Sun Wukong, who at the end of the journey arrives at the much sought after enlightenment.
The game mostly traces the events of the film, adding some scenes and changing some events, but leaving the original plot almost untouched.
Unfortunately, this does not particularly help those like us who face Monkey King: Hero is Back without previous notions of what happens in the film, and so we ensure that the storyline of the game takes a lot, really a lot, for granted, an expression of a nature more closely tied. -in that game broadly inspired by the animated film.
If initially following the events of Sun Wukong is rather simple and fun, at the introduction of the first supporting actors and, then, of the uber-villain, we clicked an unexpected shrug, accomplices a very dispersive dubbing (monsters in particular are ridiculous) and the opacity of a narrative that all too glosses over explanations: clearly there was no need to expect a plot of who knows what thickness, but we have rarely ever felt so frustrated, and then passivated, in front of a game that (and yes) tells us so little and so badly.
With better world building and better character definition, surely we would have become more and more passionate about the reckless tribulations of the Monkey God.
If the plot is the wooden tablet ready for Tameshiwari, the hand that breaks against it is the gameplay mechanics: picking up the controller and starting punching and kicking is incredibly easy, nothing to say about it, but the game seems to push a lot (perhaps too much) on the mini QTE which is activated when we manage to hit the enemy just in the instant in which the blow is about to strike us.
The idea behind this mechanic is nice in itself, but it is applied in a bad way, so much so that if it initially seemed to be able to overcome the repetitive excess of button mashing that Monkey King: Hero is Back suffers from, only ends up returning a fake sense of depth to the clashes.
If two of Sun Wukong's standard shots, the basic one and the loaded one, tire rather quickly and leave very little freedom to the imagination of the concatenations, we should applaud the Magic: they are 13 and range from defense spells, to speed boosts, up to real evocations of weapons, which, in addition to being visually spectacular, have the added value of interrupting enemy attacks in almost all cases.
The Magic that you will find yourself using the most will surely be "Mind's Eye", a power that allows you, among other things, to briefly display the enemy's health bar and the weak points to hit to do him more damage; also worth mentioning is "Fenghuang Dance" and "Kick of Qilin", which have saved our skin more than once.
Yet another example of a more scenographic than content depth, the three "gurus": each of them has the function of helping us, perhaps by enhancing the level of our vital parameters (stamina, spell bar, and number of combo hits) or the effectiveness of our spells (defensive and offensive), or simply by supplying ourselves with potions and healing elixirs in exchange for part of the materials we have recovered around the levels.
However, everything is simultaneously chaotic and incredibly on tracks, since the number and the type of recoverable materials in a given area they are limited and predefined, but without the logic that one would expect in their finding or positioning.
Unfortunately, we must continue to use tones that are anything but pleasant to describe the artificial intelligence of fellow adventurers and enemies: while the former do not have the slightest usefulness, neither in combat, nor outside, so as to be the most sometimes only a series of background noises, the brutes who will hinder our path are thedigital equivalent of a punchball, and are made fierce by their health bar and little else; the variety of enemies, moreover, is rather scarce and falls into boredom, with a repeated series loop of practically identical polygonal models, but of different colors.
It is a brutal counterpart to the attention to detail used to portray the protagonist, Sun Wukong, who evidently enjoyed the greater investment in terms of time and resources: every hair on his face, every half smile, are clearly the result of the work of many, but it is a quality that constantly risks being submerged by the democratic mediocrity of the rest of Monkey King: Hero is Back.
The level design does not raise the average, with spaces and maps apparently extended but which, during the exploration, sublimate all their emptiness, without considering the annoyance of the continuous uploads: it is understandable to wait a few seconds when passing from one area to another, but 5/6 seconds of loading to enter a very small building are really too many, especially if they have to be constantly faced for all the 15-20 hours of play. "Bad, Monkey King: Hero is Back ... Bad."
Finally, get ready for an ending that will make you feel full of your powers for about 1 minute, before the credits roll.
Monkey King: Hero is Back is a title that is far too much a rib of the animated film of the same name but, unlike the latter, it cannot hold up narrative rhythms, or a more valid raison d'être than "the film was cute ". Dull combat mechanics despite their almost centrality, a plot that sobs from event to event, a level design without panache: these are the major shortcomings of a game that, we are sure, had all the potential to please and entertain, at least on the paper. To save Monkey King: Hero is Back from the abyss of complete insufficiency, the character design of the protagonist and the Magic, true and only firework of a production that returns a deep sense of listlessness, so much on the part of those who created it , as in who will go to play it. Face it without the slightest demands, you will not be (too) disappointed.
► Monkey King: Hero Is Back is an RPG-Adventure game developed by Hexadrive Inc. and published by Sony for PC and PlayStation 4, the video game was released on 17/10/2019
