Home
of Adventure-Archiv
German
version of this page
WUKUNG
Let's go west
A journey to the West can be dangerous - especially when you're accompanied by pig-devils
and sea monsters. All love Mangas: The japanese comics with their dynamic drawings and
action-loaded, fantastic stories developed a market and a huge fan comunity here. And even
computer games have discovered Mangas: Several times this asiatic comic style has been
adapted for adventure games already.
Wukung - The Monkey King is no exception. The mystic story of one who moves out, to find the "Book of Wisdom" is based on chinese mythology, which was wrapped in Manga-graphics for this game.
An opening movie of half an hour, sometimes animated, tells the story of the chinese monk Sam Chang. He gets the order of his emperor to find the Book of Wisdom, which should be found somewhere in the west. But Chang needs help: Bevor the adventure could start, he must free Wukung himself. Though the Monkey God isn't encouraged by the voyage he could be persuaded by a magic crown.
After that Sam meeets two more companions the plump pig-devil Edgar and a sea monster. Although campaigns are also necessary here, the squad finally pools together. But not for a long time. When Wukung returns one day from providing food, that his friends vanished from the little village where they wanted to rest. To be successful with his quest he has to find and rescue his companions first.
This is the first time the player takes over the action. One has to pilot Wukung through the village, collecting some more or less magical items and solving puzzles. After finding the companions, it's even possible to choose from the 4 characters in the suitable situations of the game.
There are no complicated keyboard actions necessary to bring
forward the adventure including the four characters. With right mouse button you can go
through all possible actions: see, speek, use, and go. In the lower third of the screen
you can click through the images of the heros. Everyone of them has his own inventory
list, where you can store any number of objects. When needed, you first click on an item
in the inventory - then on the object or person it should be applied to. There is a
message line which indicates if your actions are successful or useless.
Of course this kind of game control isn't new at all. But a new feature is, when saving your game a picture of the current locations is saved with it too. Maybe it's a new feature too, that our chinese friends have a little north german idiom with the translation.
Who wants to equate Manga with massacre should be waned: Wukung is child-friendly - the only violence is marginal and very stylized. In fact Wukung is an adventure for kids anyway. The lovable characters and the rather easy puzzles show this. Kids will enjoy the funny sayings and movements of the monkey king very much, much more than older adventure-gamers who will only shrug their shoulders.
What attracted our attention:
+ good fairy-tale mix
+ atmospheric opening
- not suitable for adventure-pro's.
Developer: Abudoe/Topware
Rating:
- Graphics: 2 of 5
- Sound: 3 of 5
- Comfort: 3 of 5
- Total: 2 of 5
System requirements:
486/25, 8 MB RAM, SVGA, Windows
msu
PC-Spiel, © 12/96
Adventure-Archiv 04-07-00