Tiny Diggers – An iPad Construction Truck Game for Kids Age 2-5

What is it?

Tournament of Legends is a 3D fighting game for Wii made by High Voltage Software (Iron Man 2, The Conduit, Evasive Space) and published by Sega featuring mythology-inspired characters. It’s a pretty straightforward arcade fighter, designed with a moderate amount of depth to keep things interesting, yet producing something a bit more accessible to the new player than, let’s say, Tekken.

How does it play?

There are two base control options in the game. Players can use either a Wii Remote and Nunchuk or a Classic Controller. Each of these can be customized as well, in keeping with some of High Voltage’s other titles. The Wii Remote motion controls are wisely limited to three: shake the Nunchuk, wave the Wii Remote horizontally, or wave the Wii Remote vertically. These are two slash attacks and a chop attack, and the buttons map to a weapon throwing attack (which uses energy), plus a block, a dodge, charge, taunt, an unblockable slow power attack, and enchantments. Classic Controller options are also available, and for me that was the preferred way to play.

The fighters in this game, called Legends, are inspired by various mythologies. For example, there’s a gladiator type called Marcus, a valkyrie type called Kara (my favorite), and a minotaur called Bravehoof (hilariously typoed as Bravehoff in the manual, bringing to mind a Native American version of Knight Rider’s Michael Knight). Each fighter has varying base stats, such as weight class, movement speed, strength, and energy gain. Battle venues include an ice cave, a marketplace, and the deck of a ship inside the belly of a leviathan. Battling through the game in single-player mode unlocks selectable weapons and enchantments Mega Man style, which can be activated in battle (provided you’ve managed to fill your enchantment meter) and used against your opponents. Enchantments can be elemental effects like burn or other things like life steal. These must be unlocked for each character you play as by defeating other Legends, and along with your weapon, any one can be selected at the beginning of each match. Losing or quitting won’t harm your unlocking progess, which is great.

During battle, there’s an armor meter wrapped around your Legend’s portrait. This reflects the armor remaining on your head, each of your arms, and your torso. You can see the actual armor on your Legend breaking away as you take damage as well, which is kind of a neat effect. Both life and armor can be restored between rounds using a skippable minigame (you spin the left and right stick to regenerate life and armor respectively). One of the challenges is deciding which you’d rather restore if you’re in bad shape to begin with. Do you heal up, or do you spend time replenishing your armor? A little of both?

Something I hadn’t seen before in a fighting game was the “Range Ring,” though in a way this reminded me of the Wii version of Prince of Persia: The Forgotten Sands. A colored arc of light appears before you on the ground, and it changes appearance when your opponent is in range. This gives you a sense of whether you can hit your enemy with a melee attack. Of course you might be able to anyway if they’re moving toward you when you swing, but generally it gives you a good idea if you’re going to miss and open yourself to a swift counter. This is important, because the recovery time from moves in this game is very slow, almost to the point of realism and sometimes even beyond.

When a Legend is knocked down, they need to complete a stick-moving minigame (effectively a quick-time event) to get back up, very much like in Punch-Out!!. You can actually fail this pretty easily and lose the battle if you don’t try hard enough to get up. The opponent who’s waiting for you to get back up gets their own minigame to play as well, which will help them recover health and energy while taunting you. Events like these can take place during the match as well, as Controller Challenges will suddenly take place to avoid environmental challenges, like a Titan stomping through the Netherworld Bazaar or a Centaur charging through the arena in the Eternal Forest.

These arcadey mix-ups in the game really set a tone. This is very much more a SoulCalibur type game than a Tekken, but in overall mechanics, it plays out more like Punch-Out!!. This doesn’t make it a bad game at all, just a different kind of experience. This is not as serious or complex a game. While there is a combo system in place, the combos are pretty easy to pull off: just press each of the three basic attack buttons in sequence, in any order. Pull them off, and the game counts them off with overlaid roman numerals. That’s a combo. Combo and then charge your opponent to knock them down. When they’re knocked down, taunt them for bonuses. It’s complex enough to be entertaining, but there isn’t that ridiculous bar to entry you find in a Tekken or Virtua Fighter game.

At the same time, you can’t button mash your way through this. Blocking becomes essential pretty early on even on normal difficulty, and nailing down a strategic combination of Legend, Weapon, and Enchantment may be your best idea. I found it much harder to beat the computer-controlled Legends on normal in this game than, say, the CPU-controlled fighters in SoulCalibur II.

How does it look and sound?

As they tend to do again and again, the people at High Voltage Software have produced one of the better looking titles on the platform. Technically speaking, the game is very impressive to look at. A lot of time appears to have gone into making the game look as good as it can. The animations are nice and smooth too, but the character placement turns out a little clumsy at times. When you knock someone down, both players kind of freeze where they are. If you’re very close to your opponent, you’ll still be standing right there when they get up, and the game bumps you instantly back a significant distance with no animation, which looks messy. You probably tossed aside your weapons for a stretch while taunting your knocked down opponent, but no worry. As soon as they’ve stood back up, your weapons will instantly reappear in your hands. Spells and other special effects are appropriately flashy, and the camera does a good job of staying out of the way without feeling too mechanical.

The music is effective but unremarkable. The sound effects feel pretty limited, as it sounds just the same to hit a flesh opponent as a metal one. I wasn’t surprised to find that the voice acting ranges from bad to horrible, and it’s not just the acting, it’s the writing. The anachronistic taunts (“That’s what I call pumping iron!” when the valkyrie beats a metal opponent) were annoying, and hearing the same three lines from the standing Legend every time they waited for the other get back up got old fast. This was especially true of Marcus the gladiator, who says, “As Julius Caesar once said…” and he often never finishes the line, despite having a good fifteen seconds available to do so.

How’s the replay value?

There’s no online play, which is not surprising of a fighting game on Wii. Those don’t work online, we accept that. You can run through and unlock all the Legends, plus all their compatible weapons and a surprising number of Enchantments for each Legend. There is some bonus material to page through if you have a few minutes to waste. Ultimately, it comes down to whether you have someone else around who wants to play the game with you locally, and how compelling you find the characters.

Is it worth it?

It’s a different experience from the other major fighters on Wii (Super Smash Bros Brawl, Tatsunoko vs Capcom) but with fewer selectable fighters than either of those games and none of the familiar faces, it may or may not appeal. It’s technically very impressive and a lot of fun, and definitely has something of a hardcore challenge level on the default difficulty. If that makes you happy, you’ll probably like the game. Otherwise, I’d recommend a rental first to make sure.

I’ll give this four out of five.