From Taiwanese indie team Creative Games & Computer Graphics (CGCG), The Legend of Tianding is a fun 2D platforming beat ’em up type deal. It’s very much in the style of Dead Cells.

Just with more Japanese colonial era stuff.

We mean, the save spot in the game is a Japanese tea ceremony and we were pretty sold on it from that moment. And yeah! This one is fun.

The Legend of Tianding (or Tian Ding like… it depends on whatever)

The Legend of Tianding is available on all consoles and PC. It launched in November 2021 and met with good reviews.

Straight up, it’s nothing revolutionary. It’s kind of like an advanced Streets of Rage kind of deals, just with a lot of Dead Cells influences going on.

However, its art style and story are good fun. You take control of Liao Tianding, a legendary Robin Hood type of folk hero in Taiwan.

It’s your job to explore the streets of Colonial era Japanese Taiwan to as the heroic outlaw, beating up greedy business owners and assisting locals.

CGCG really put a lot of effort into its manga style. There’s a comic book theme throughout, which lends itself every well to the action. Behold!

The aesthetic and fast-paced, frenetic action are the backbone of the game. That’s all handled well and you do get stuck in to the battle sequences.

One nifty feature is being able to steal the weapons off baddies and use them as your own, which is pretty cool.

And it’s all great to look at and listen to. There’s a strong soundtrack underpinning the action. From our research, it was by a mixture of Taiwanese composers.

 

But it harks to classic game soundtracks from Ōkami (2006) and recent indie games such as Trek to Yomi (2022).

The Legend of Tianding is a good game. Our reservation with it is how it’s nothing we haven’t seen 1,000 times already on the indie scene.

Other indie games often twist genre conventions to invent something new and interesting, but that’s not going on here.

However, we do love the setting of the game. It’s just outside of that you get the usual beating up baddies and whatnot, which does get a bit repetitive after a while.

There’s about five hours of gameplay here, though, which is a great thing about indie games—it doesn’t outstay its welcome.

But we suppose it focusses a bit too much on its aesthetics, rather than providing any sort of unique gameplay attributes.

Give it a whirl if it takes your fancy, but we do think head straight to Dead Cells first if you’ve not played that yet. As it’s a classic, although full marks to The Legend of Tianding for its creative manga-styled romp.