The game had potential to be decent, yet broken controls ruin the experience completely.
Enter Invincible Tiger: The Legend of Han Tao. Anyone who have watched a ton of kung-fu movies would already understand the story behind this game: a mysterious artifact only mentioned as a myth has been found and stolen by an evil overlord and it is up to a legendary warrior named Han Tao (reduced to nothing more than a drunk) to stop him. With 5 levels to go through and an intense difficulty to make you want to go back and improve your progress as you make your way through the game, one would expect a somewhat decent running with this game. Unfortunately, one thing prevented thing from becoming nothing more than a waste of 15 dollars: BROKEN CONTROLS.
From the moment you take control of Han Tao, something is obviously wrong. When you press the analog stick or D-Pad forward, he normally takes quite a bit of time to actually move in the direction that you want him to go. In other words, his movements are a bit sluggish before finally deciding to respond to your commands. And it also doesn't help when he does not attack or evade when you input them. I mean, the controls are very simplistic (square to punch, triangle to kick, 'x' to jump and circle for environmental situations while the right analog stick is for dodging) and Han Tao has a lot of combos in his arsenals as well yet they are very unresponsive at times to the point where you would get frustrated time after time.
Beat-em-ups are always repetitive, no question about that. I do however have a problem with games that have broken controls. Invincible Tiger: The Legend of Han Tao is a very hard and challenging game with swarms of enemies attacking you at once to keep you on your toes, the broken controls however should NOT make the game any harder than it already is.
One of the positives out of the game is the visuals and how it looks like something out of an old Chinese novel. However, to my standards, visuals are the LAST thing in my mind. Gameplay should come over pretty looking HD-graphics followed by tight and responsive controls, which this game fails upon very quickly.
My word of advice, avoid this game. If you have, let's say, Sonic's Ultimate Genesis Collection, then you could play some good 2D side scrolling beat-em-up games such as the Streets of Rage series and Comix Zone. While they are all hard games as well, but at least the controls are responsive unlike this one. Save your 15 dollars.