Chu’s Dynasty is perhaps one of the more unusual games in the Uprising event, mixing the movement and four player combat of the Super Smash Bros. series with the attack and defense mechanics of Street Fighter IV. Fighting game fans may be wondering how that even works, and the answer is "surprisingly well." While there is a bit of a learning curve, Chu’s Dynasty offers a pretty fun time once you’ve learned the controls.
As in most fighting games, your goal in Chu’s Dynasty is to pick a character and beat up every other character that opposes you. Unlike most of its peers however, Chu’s Dynasty gives you actual stage geometry to play on; it’s not just a flat empty space. Instead you have to go from platform to platform, using double jumps in some cases to avoid falling into pits, much like in Smash games. Yet the rest of the fight is much more conventional, with health meters replacing the mechanics of being defeated by being knocked off the stage and combat revolving around the interaction of high and low attacks alongside throws to defeat blocking tactics.
The game supports combat for up to four players, and coincidentally enough there are four characters to pick from. While they all share some universal traits, they all have their specialties as well; one character is slow but powerful, another is well-rounded, a third one uses tricky attacks (including portals that warp your enemy around if they make contact), and a fourth uses speed, projectiles, and lunging attacks. These are very basic summaries and don’t really show the full depth of each character, but rest assured there is more to each of them than these descriptions suggest.
Controlling your character is strange at first and definitely takes time to get used to, but it’s worth doing. Walking, running, and jumping are done by the left analog stick while your triggers control special defenses and ’time attack’ mechanics, with A/B/X/Y handling a mix of regular and special attacks. Attacks hit at different heights, and in turn you can block high or low; this is done by either being in walking mode or letting go of the analog stick (these block high), or holding straight down to crouch and block low. It takes getting used to, but it’s not a bad control layout.
Fighting is a mix of genre fundamentals such as mixing up your high and low attacks along with throws to get past an opponent’s blocking, fast and loose movement similar to Smash games, and spectacular attacks. While your ’Ki attacks’ are impressive on their own, done by using a gauge that fills up with each hit you take, the real interesting part is a series of Time attacks. Each character can manipulate time itself in some way, such as undoing one of their moves or recording an attack and then spawning a clone to repeat it at the same location later on. They’re quite creative, and add some nice variety to the fight.
It’s probably not fair to expect an indie fighting game (with the lower budget that implies) to be as polished as a professional release, though this nonetheless leads to a few problems. There are strange omissions like the lack of a proper Training Mode (what the game calls "Training Mode" is actually a series of written tutorials, though the developer seems eager to adding a real training mode in the future), the occasional modest bug, and even a few balance issues. The developer hasn’t shied away from these matters however, eagerly gathering feedback on various fighting game enthusiast sites and suggesting these will be addressed with patches in the near future. It’s a very encouraging attitude for a developer to have, and one can only hope it works out well.
While Chu’s Dynasty is rough around the edges, it is both fun in its current state and shows a great deal of potential that the developer seems keen to bring out over time. It’s a good purchase now at $3 USD/240 Microsoft Points and should only get better from here, so fighting game fans should give Chu’s Dynasty a try. That said, you should be sure you have some local people to play with; Chu’s Dynasty does not presently have online play and the AI, like most fighting game AIs, isn’t much fun to play against.
