In 2000 Jackie Chan was at the height of his popularity. Numerous of his old movies were being re-edited and released for the western market for the first time and his new movies were banking in big at the American box office and with his unique brand of action and humor he saw a worldwide acceptance from the audience.

During this time an animated TV show was also developed and premieredon Kids 'WB during the later parts of 2000. The show centers around Jackie as an archaeologist who accidentally gets dragged into becoming a secret agent for Section 13, who are fighting against the evil organization Dark Hand and preventing them from ressurecting the demon Shendu. At Jackie's side we have his niece Jade, who constantly get him into trouble because of her impulsive nature. Like most morning cartoons in America, this show was followed by a wave of merchandise such as toys and 2 video games, one for Game Boy Advance and one for PS2.

The GBA game was released in 2001 and developed by Australian Torus Games, who had previously done numerous licenced GBA titles. On the box, it asks "are you Chan enough?" and later states that it's "Time to prove that you're the Chan!". I guess this is the martial arts equivalent of "smurfing around". The story follows the TV show as you control Jackie through 10 stages hunting down Dark Hand minions. You'll be taken to locations like San Francisco, Siberia, Aztec ruins and The Forbidden City.

The gameplay is similar to that of the classic beat em ups during the early 90's like Final Fight or Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. You can steer Jackie in all directions and the game progresses as you walk to the right. Thugs and ninjas will appear in groups which you get to beat up without any mercy until the game lets you continue walking right before eventually facing the end level boss. When you start you have a punch and kick button which can be linked to small combos, but per stage you can find secret scrolls that will either give you entirely new moves by the press of multiple buttons at once or extend the basic combos. The shoulder buttons allows you to block incoming attacks and jump as if you are on the moon.

Graphically the game is a hit and miss. The opening cutscenes looks nice and pretty true to the look of the cartoon series, but ingame you'll struggle to really see any reason why you should believe you are controlling Jackie Chan. While the sprites are quite big by GBA standard, they lack true detail and characteristics to create any familiarity to the sprites. The moves you can perform are quite dull without any real connection to Jackie's onscreen fighting, even if you look at the cartoon's fighting style.

The enemy sprites also recycle a ton and you'll quickly grow tired of seeing them over and over while mindlessly beating them to a pulp. The bosses are pretty much the only part of the game which shows some real unique effort as they all look surprisingly detailed compared to the other sprites. The levels also has some recycling problems as you'll find yourself extremely bored halfway through each and every stage. I swear that I multiple times asked myself if the game just put me back at the beginning of the stage because there's so little distinction between each area. While there are objects to both destroy and use as weapons, it hardly make any difference to the game. Musically the game only has a few tracks which, you guessed it, are reused from stage to stage. The music isn't necessarily bad but it's far from memorable.

Once you reach the end, you'll fight the evil demon Shendu in one of the easiest end bosses I've ever encountered. After a few minutes of kicking mindlessly while standing beneath him. He warns you that he'll be back and flashes away as Jackie yet again has saved the day. You're then treated to an ending with no animation, just static sprites and speech bubbles. Once the awful joke has stained your already foul mood, the game takes you back to the title screen with no credits in sight.

There are worse games out there obviously and for GBA standards the game runs quite smoothly even with the large sprites. But apart from being titled Jackie Chan Adventures, it could just as well been called Corey Feldman's World Tour because there's little Jackie Chan about this game to be found.