I’ve always been a sucker for over the top fighting games. Heck, half of my childhood memories revolve around pulling off fatalities and throwing off Hadoukens against my friends at the local arcade. As weird as it sounds, since the fighting game genre became more about style and substance than over the top fun, I’ve kind of lost interest.

Sega Europe and High Voltage Software’s Tournament of Legends was originally supposed to be a flashback to those long gone days of over the top arcade fighters. Meant to appeal to fans of the original Mortal Kombat and Street Fighter games, the original idea behind the game was to even include fatality style finishing moves. The end result however is nothing of the kind. It’ slow, unresponsive and has no identity of its own. To put it simply, it’s more War Gods than anything else.

Perhaps the biggest problem with Tournament of Legends is the fact that it could have been so much more than what it is. The premise, which finds you taking on the role of one of the ten classic archetypical characters and doing battle in a tournament to crown the baddest of the bad is a decent one. And come on, who wouldn’t want to control a Minotaur or a gladiator with kick-ass armor and weapons. However great the idea is, how it was implemented is an entirely different story altogether. Each fighter, regardless of their different attributes or strengths feels remarkably the same as the next. Save for a few special moves for each character (more on those later), there’s not much different about each fighter, which takes an enormous amount of skill out of the game.

The core problem with Tournament of Legends is just how broken of a game it feels like. The Wii hasn’t been the most friendly system for 3D fighters, and this is game is a perfect example of why. Thanks to finicky, stubborn controls, it’s almost impossible to string together worthwhile combos. All too often, I noticed a more than slight delay on just about every move I tried to pull off, leading to a clunky attack that will more than likely get blocked. This delay seemed to happen on just about every control setup, so it’s not just a button or waggle problem, it’s a problem with the game in general.

Undoubtedly, the place where the horrid controls are felt the worst are with the close quarters combat. See, the game likes to pretend that certain fighters have better attributes than others, and one of them is speed; so the goal is to get in close, deliver some effective blows and get out. This is extremely harder than it sounds as the same problems I talked about earlier prevent you from doing any sort of quick attacks. What’s more, it even leaves you open for any number of slow and powerful hits from your enemy.

Adding to the problems of Tournament of Legends is the game’s absurdly clumsy camera system. From time to time, the camera decides that the best place to view the fight is from a very uncomfortable angle near the top of the arena.  This makes it almost impossible to navigate the distance between your opponent and yourself and strategize accordingly.

The arenas, however, are some of the game’s best features. Modeled after what the gladiators would have called “home” in their respective times (or universes). Granted they’re a bit over the top, like the fire dragons and whatnot, but they’re also pretty imaginative and fun to look at. They’re also filled with environmental dangers that can attack, or sometimes even defeat your adversaries very quickly. Easily one of the best parts of the game, the kills include everything from attacks from sacred beasts to weapons and obstacles mounted on the wall. Though they were helpful, there’s really only a few throughout the stage, meaning that you’re going to grow tired of them long before you should.

The visuals in Tournament of Legends aren’t bad, they’re just nothing to write home about. The characters and arenas themselves look as you’d expect, it’s just that the animations they perform are awkward at best. Mix that with a pretty awful collision detection system and you’ve got one clunky fighter. It’s just a shame as some of the character models are quite cool.

There’s not a lot of 3D fighters for the Wii, but don’t let that be a reason to waste your money on this stinker of a title. With all of its potential, and everything it had going for it, Tournament of Legends could have been a sleeper hit for a genre that has been all but ignored on the Wii, sadly though - it’s an unimpressive and disappointing broken game.