izigame.me

Game is okay. It has some things I don't prefer, but overall doesn't do anything egregiously awful and doesn't excel in any particular area that really wows me either.
As a metroidvania brawler, movement and action are a little slow to my taste. There isn't any means of increasing movement speed, so you're stuck to the character's very floaty running pace. The forward kick gives you a slight boost, so I tried spamming that as a means of increasing traversal speed, but it wasn't fast enough that it was worth the trouble. Not an objectively bad thing, but definitely very dissatisfying for me when it comes to this genre of games.
Action is also just okay. You get a total of 4 combat techniques and it doesn't get much more complex from there. Stringing these techniques together to make a combo is pretty limited. At most, you might string 3 techniques together, mixed in with a bit of the basic attack. There's a neat mechanic introduced with the One-Inch Punch that lets you immediately input the One-Inch Punch after a basic attack. Would have liked to see more combat mechanics like this, where there are special circumstances to make certain strings of attacks come out faster.
I prefer my combat more on the fast paced side with the opportunity to string almost everything together. Games like Dust an Elyisan Tale and Odin Sphere are great examples of this where the player is really just allowed to let loose. And it's SO much fun. As it is for Tianding though, combat consists of doing a 2-3 input combo, watching the enemy crumple, and then waiting for them to get up so you can do another 2-3 hit combo that will crumple them again. It isn't very exciting to me.
Which brings me back to Traversal. The best metroidvania brawlers meld both traversal and combat. Tianding makes use of its combat techniques as traversal techniques in some pretty standard fun ways, but unfortunately there's a lot of areas where it feels like just two separate things that occur in the same game. Not necessarily bad, but it does get a little wonky in certain mechanics. The worst example is the grapple hook. It occurs really rarely, and is used almost entirely only for traversal puzzles. To the point that I have to remind myself what button it is every few times it shows up. What makes this especially sad is that there already is an enemy grapple hook system. It's the sash that lets you throw and steal from enemies. It would have been amazing if these two mechanics were mixed together so you could grapple, throw, and fling yourself with enemies.
And lastly, the writing and story is really just okay. I grew up watching classic wushu martial arts films, so I get a lot of the themes of where this story was drawing from. There's the female childhood friend that sold herself into a brothel, and now you're trying to buy back her freedom. There's the evil foreign colonialists, and the one single good foreigner that the main character kind of banters with comedically. And so on. They're all classic set pieces I appreciate, so I'd be a hypocrite to say they're bad. But it certainly feels unimagined. There's nothing interesting that really sets it apart, and feels more like I'm playing out an old wushu film template. It's like the videogame version of Christian Rock songs where they take a classic pop song and just replace every other word with Lord or Jesus. Which I can't stress enough isn't necessarily bad. But it's definitely not a recipe for anything particularly good.
So overall, it's a middling experience. I wouldn't call this game bad, and I got pretty much the experience I figured I was paying for. But I wouldn't recommend it over dozens of other games of the same genre that do the same things but in so much more interesting ways.