Bruce Lee: Return of the Legend - A Film in Your Hands

12/01/25

Beat’em ups are a surprisingly sidelined genre on the GBA, with the majority of them feeling like retreads - or actual re-releases - of SNES-era titles. It’s a shame - we never get something like Streets of Rage, or The Punisher - but it’s not a total desert here. For some reason, there were a couple of Bruce Lee-themed video games popping up in the early 2000s - namely, a oft-maligned Xbox title, and today’s diamond in the rough Bruce Lee: Return of the Legend. A title that, much like the last game of 2024 I reviewed, doesn’t do everything amazing, but brings enough to the table, with enough passion at the helm, to stick out as one of the Game Boy Advance’s oft-overlooked treasures.

As a wimpy, stick-armed white guy, I’m obviously a huge fan of some well-choreographed, pulse-pumping material arts action. Stuff like The Raid or IP Man is exactly in my wheelhouse, but outside of the odd clip here and there, I’ve never watched any of Bruce Lee’s acclaimed lineup for martial arts movies. Hell, I *own* a copy of Way of the Dragon, and maybe this’ll be the thing that actually gets me to actually watch it. Simply put, Bruce Lee: Return of the Legend is a true diamond in the rough for the GBA’s third party output. What initially seems to be another store-brand platformer, turns out to be a fantastic blend of platforming, stealth, and beat’em up action, with a sense of fluidity rarely seen on the console. Its short length is a little disappointing, along with how tight and repetitive the stealth can be, but amongst I really shouldn’t be that surprised of this game's general quality - it’s Vicarious Visions, who frequently provide the higher standard of care to these otherwise throwaway licensed titles. Most of the time, at least - it’s been a while, but I still remember Finding Nemo.

As far as I can tell, Bruce Lee: Return of the Legend doesn’t adapt any specific Bruce Lee epic, but I get the general vibe it’s an overall send-up of both the genre and his body of work. Martial artist Hai Fang (portrayed in game through the guise of Bruce Lee) sets out on a journey of revenge for his master’s death by infiltrating the dangerous Yakan crime syndicate, securing an alliance with CIA officer Booth in the process. It’s a very simplistic narrative, one just to get your from set piece to set piece, but it’s a perfect encapsulation of how simplistically satisfying many martial arts can be - no need for major, heart-pounding dialogue or emotional introspection; this is balls-to-the-wall movie moments, no doubt about it. Hell, the game opens and closes on ‘shots’ that feel like they could be ripped (albeit obviously stripped down) directly from any number of classic martial art movies.

At the very least, this edition of Bruce Lee’s video game adventures seems a LOT better than the Xbox game released around the same time - I took one look at that on YouTube, and yeeesh.

The game has two major kinds of levels - most are based around general action-platforming segments - usually beating up anyone who gets in your way, diving over some pits, with the odd boss here and there. Additionally, some of these action-platforming levels will throw on an extra stipulation - usually a time limit to either leave the area, or rescue a number of prisoners before escaping the level. Platforming is actually pretty engaging in this title; there’s just a fantastic sense of fluidity to Fang’s movement, especially with how you can bounce off walls, both to platform and to get around foes. Beyond that it’s not super complex, but it just feels satisfying to engage with, and that’s enough for me. There’s only a few of the more exploratory levels, and whilst their open nature does mix things up in a nice way, the monotone designs of the levels can make finding everything you need rather annoying, and in all cases I lost my first attempt and slaughtered the second, since I just had a better awareness of where I had to go.

Also, this game gets points simply for having a level take place on a moving convoy that you slowly work your way to the front of. I dunno what it is, perhaps the sense of progression as you move up the convoy, but they’re the best kind of levels in platformers, and I’m delighted Bruce Lee had one.

With the game being a homage to martial arts movies as a whole, a lot of work has been put into providing some form of simplified replication of Bruce Lee’s iconic moveset. Whilst I wouldn’t describe the combat as complex, there’s a surprising amount of moves for you to play around with. Punches and kicks, each of which had modifiers if you’re holding a particular direction, along with a number of aerial attacks to spice things up. The usefulness of each move might not always match up, but the average foe isn’t strong enough for it to really matter, so you can just cut loose and kick ass. Enemies can, if you’re fast enough, be ‘sneak killed’ if you hit them from behind, taking most - if not all - of their health in one go.Occasionally, enemies will drop weapons Fang can utilize - namely some nunchaku, a quarterstaff, or some throwing knives. These don’t really add much to the combat overall, with the former two being rather spammy and crowd clearers, but they’re a nice little addition. The knives feel really fun, mostly in the sense of how devastating they are. A single hit will kill most enemies and it just pays dividends in making Fang feel like a master of martial arts.

The game’s intermittent boss fights are… interesting, to say the least. They’re not broken or anything remotely like that; they’re just hard as balls. Especially the last few, these foes will slice through Fang’s health bar within seconds if you don’t block and evade their blows. Honestly, whilst the combat isn’t the most complex in the world, it’s best to just find a cheesy strategy that works - I found for many bosses, do a flying kick, than following it up with a triple punch helped me keep foes at arm’s length whilst slowly chunking down their healthbars. This issue is mostly only a case in the game’s final boss rush, which features pretty much everything the game has to throw at you, culminating in a brutal final boss that - whilst fun and engaging to deal with - feels terrible to get chunked to death and do it all over again.

As a side note, whilst the game is - as expected of a beat’em up - fairly short, with my run locking in at around two hours, Return of the Legend has enough extra content for those looking to get a little more time out of this plucky little platformer. It’s got a number of difficulties to mess around with, but also an entire Director’s Cut story mode, which remixes the damage and position of foes and items throughout the game, whilst also having a couple decent surprises thrown in for good measure. It’s nothing too crazy, but with how lean a lot of these games can be, even these little offerings are fantastic.

The second variety of levels - stealth - are absolutely the weak point in the game - not its existence itself; it’s actually pretty solid for a clearly low-budget game like this, especially in combination with the surprising amount of maneuverability Fang has as a character. No, the real issues in how repetitive it can get, as it can be *very* easy to actually slip into the range of enemy detection. It’s rare that you get pushed back *that* far, but each enemy requires a very particular (which can grow quite complex in the last few stages) set of actions to avoid their sight, which can lead to a lot of repetition if you just keep messing up that one particular move. At the same time, it does do a lot of heavy lifting to keep the game’s more baseline action-platforming from growing too boring. Seriously though, the rush of nailing a bunch of wall bounces and whatnot to avoid detection feels amazing when it all goes well. The best levels are ones where the game gives you some knife pickups, allowing you to essentially assassinate certain troops before they can see you - I think the later, longer levels would have benefited immensely from having those in play, too, as a fallback.

The general aesthetics and backgrounds of the game could look a bit better, since they all have that kind of ‘disused warehouse’ or ‘ancient martial arts temple’ look to them, but for what it’s worth the animation work and general look of the character models deserve praise. Vicarious Visions always lands when it comes to at least one major level of the audio-visual design, and with how important making the kung-fu look credible is to this game, even on the small screen, they nailed it for the most part. Shout out to the game’s ‘cutscenes’ - stills on a background with a text box - sometimes just using a picture of Bruce Lee with some blurry drawn character in the background. Always give me a good laugh. Hell, even the bevy of ‘wa-hah’ and other battle cries uttered by Fang in pretty much any combat sequence are just the icing on the cake of this game’s great audio design, feeling like a fully-fledged, albeit bit-crunched, score to a classic martial arts flick.

Games like Bruce Lee: Return of the Legend is a shining example of why I love doing the Game Boy Abyss - I’d never heard of this title, and whilst it’s not incredible, it’s clearly made with passion and probably stands as one of the best beat’em ups on the platform. Feeling like a martial arts flick on the small screen, Return of the Legend is frequently satisfying to pound through dozens of foes and engage in some ‘flipping’ awesome platforming, which does enough to offset the occasionally frustrating stealth and boss fights. Now, if you excuse me, I should probably go watch Way of the Dragon…

Thank you for reading my review of Bruce Lee: Return of the Legend! It’s the first Game Boy Abyss review of 2025, and I’m glad I’m kicking things off with something enjoyable. I think my goal this year is to spend a little less time playing games that seem to be the bottom of the barrel - next review will be Peter Pan: Return to Neverland, so that’ll be… yeah, but after that, I’m going to be tackling a few games that just *have* to be better. As always, you can find me over on Twitter @Lemmy7003, or on Bluesky and Twitch under GameBoyAbyss. Thanks again for reading, and I’ll see you next time!