Not only does the game loosely-enough parallel events of the movie, it takes its artistic license beyond predictable bounds and introduces new bad guys and environments that patch themselves into Kung Fu Panda’s pastiche. In those respects, the Kung Fu Panda video game is going to surprise some folks. The trick behind Luxoflux’s particular trade, however, wasn’t just masking all of these influences behind the curtain of a summer popcorn flick: It was working within the bounds of a fictional universe not wholly their own, nurturing the gameplay to stand (and then walk) on its own two feet, and complementing the lore of Kung Fu Panda the movie without reducing the video game to a paint-by-numbers walkthrough of the script. There’s even enough love to go around the multiplayer side to open the doors for match-three Bejeweled aficionados, as well as Memory card flippers using the game’s characters hopping across a life-size board. A storm-wrought chapter flying through thunderheads hearkens back to 1983’s Star Wars arcade stand-up, while the multiplayer fighting takes place on multi-tiered Super Smash Bros. There’s some Sonic the Hedgehog when rolling headlong into half-pipes lined with Chinese coins, and a bona fide head nod to Frogger in some watery platforming scenes. There are echoes of God of War in their quick time events and snapshots of the Incredible Hulk when hurling barrels across a courtyard. You can tell that they love video games - paying attention to beat ‘em ups in particular - and have scrawled some useful notes along the way. Luxoflux didn’t develop Kung Fu Panda in a vacuum.
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