Luxoflux didn’t develop Kung Fu Panda in a vacuum. You can tell that they love video games -- paying attention to beat ‘em ups in particular -- and have scrawled some useful notes along the way. There are echoes of God of War in their quick time events and snapshots of the Incredible Hulk when hurling barrels across a courtyard. There’s some Sonic the Hedgehog when rolling headlong into half-pipes lined with Chinese coins, and a bona fide head nod to Frogger in some watery platforming scenes. A storm-wrought chapter flying through thunderheads hearkens back to 1983’s Star Wars arcade stand-up, while the multiplayer fighting takes place on multi-tiered Super Smash Bros. Brawl arenas. There’s even enough love to go around the multiplayer side to open the doors for match-three Bejeweled aficionados, as well as Memory card flippers using the game’s characters hopping across a life-size board.

The trick behind Luxoflux’s particular trade, however, wasn’t just masking all of these influences behind the curtain of a summer popcorn flick: It was working within the bounds of a fictional universe not wholly their own, nurturing the gameplay to stand (and then walk) on its own two feet, and complementing the lore of Kung Fu Panda the movie without reducing the video game to a paint-by-numbers walkthrough of the script.

In those respects, the Kung Fu Panda video game is going to surprise some folks.

Not only does the game loosely-enough parallel events of the movie, it takes its artistic license beyond predictable bounds and introduces new bad guys and environments that patch themselves into Kung Fu Panda’s pastiche. Still, there are plenty of martial arts movie tropes Luxoflux indulged in, paying homage to classic martial arts movie ideals that would leave Kung Fu Panda feeling amiss if it went without.



Fighting takes place everywhere it should: In the furniture-heavy teahouse, on the serene lake surface, up to the mountaintop temple, swinging through the tree branches, across the rooftops of a peaceful village. Likewise, boss battles crop up within neatly-crafted arenas: In the cobblestoned coliseum, across canyon-spanning bridges, in a treasure-laden palace. All of which are painted with a minimalist aesthetic (by contemporary push-the-pixel standards) which, again, is in keeping with classical Chinese art: A pagoda at the crest of a vertical rise, or at the iris of a lily-padded lake; a wide-bottomed boat swaying through a river canyon; or a peach blossom tree silhouetted on a cliff’s edge. This speaks highly of the concept artists’ attention to detail as well.

Some of the game’s storytelling, however, is obviously stunted by the need to balance its own side stories with that of the movie’s overarching narrative. The fog-at-dawn Lake of Tears is a gorgeous location that doesn’t exist within the film, but Po the Panda undertakes a save-the-turtle-hatchlings mission that bears no relevance to the main story -- other than to perhaps reinforce that Po is the people’s hero, willing to backburner his own quest in the interests of quelling any disturbance of the peace. In another out-of-sync chapter, Po makes his way with feline grace across wolf-inhabited woodlands to face a trio of moonblade-spinning Siamese cats … for reasons no more definable than Po got lost somewhere during his travels and was hoping to grab a warm meal.

Not including the film’s prison which housed banished bad guy Tai Lung is a questionable oversight, however. And, given Tai Lung’s ambiguous intro into the game, the sense that an ultimate bad guy even exists is a vague concept. Without the story’s narrative not feelin...