Topic: Review of The Hand of Panda

Review of the Hand of Panda

Wanna-be Kung-Fu Panda

The Nintendo Eshop is host to a variety of fantastic and "interesting" games so to say the least. These quality of games only continue to increase with each passing week the Eshop remains active. When games like Hand of Panda are released, the "interesting" aspect is strongly put into effect.

The Hand of Panda has players take control of our titular hero as he competes in competitions where competitors must break the world's strongest materials. To do so, he lies under the tutelage of Master Koi who recruited Panda after Panda showed his strength to his master in a fit of rage after being bullied. However, in addition to this bare-boned plot lies an underlying threat of a lurking darkness that appears randomly. This darkness leads the ending of the game to be abrupt with no closure on whatever this story was meant to be about. In a nutshell, Hand of Panda's story is an extremely basic version of the plot from Kung-Fu-Panda excluding the development of characters and the addition of uninteresting plot points.

Thankfully, the gameplay has a fighting chance at becoming this game's redeeming factor. The Hand of Panda consists of using the bottom screen of the 3ds to hit matching buttons that pertain to the letter buttons and arrow keys. Hitting these buttons in the correct order will charge up a power meter to a certain point that will allow Panda to break materials. Since the game is split into three different difficulties (easy, medium, and hard), the yearning for more advanced controls are present. While hard mode does offer a challenge, it still manages to have its flaws as since the difficulty of the mode lies in the speed of pressing buttons, the frame rate drops, ruining the flow of one's combo. Easy and Medium modes have great learning curvatures, but simply pressing buttons on these modes becomes tedious quite quickly. Simply implementing stylus controls would have added a bit more spice to the gameplay.

Those who say graphics mean nothing for a game are wrong. This is because the graphics of Hand of Panda look out of place due to unbalanced forms of illustrations and unpolished 3d models that have the appearance of being edgy. Not only that, but the cut-scenes that are shown consist of oddly drawn backgrounds and characters. However, the music saves the abysmal graphics by having a varied soundtrack ranging from Japanese styled music to techno themed tunes.
The Hand of Panda has an abundance of flaws, there is no denying that. However, it manages to somehow keep itself up through its gameplay and soundtrack alone. These two factors really stood out as being authentically well done. If your looking for a game with one of these factors then your in the right place. But, even these aspects are overshadowed by Hand of Panda's ridiculously short run time that does little to justify its price of $5.99.