Shaolin's Road started as a regional french game in 1994 made by Infogrames. In 1996 Philips published this game in other regions as well, including The Netherlands. Philips did this to compensate for the drought of CD-i games in 1996: They realized it was easy money to give some regional titles like Shaolin's Road and Axis & Allies a broader public. Why these titles did not get a worldwide release in the beginning is an interesting question. Perhaps Philips did not have a certain level of trust in the quality of the titles. In the case of Shaolin's Road, I can imagine.
Shaolin's Road is an animated adventure which uses a certain style of animation that we've seen more often in CD-i games, unfortunately. It is a widely used technique to have a cartoon-like scene on the base-case CD-i system, while it feels like it is a full-screen animation. Unfortunately these animation scenes have a very low framerate and a very low resolution (even for CD-i standards).
The game is a bit monotonous and repetitive. You can actually find hardly any info about Shaolin's Road on the Internet. The game has a kung-fu theme, but the rich history is explained VERY briefly. This could have been done far more extensive to get a bit more of an immersive experience. The colors are very bright, in fact a bit too bright, it adds to the loq quality of these scenes. The adventure is told in this animated way. Along your adventure you have to play simple arcade-like minigames or solve simple 1-screen puzzles.
You walk in an open-ended world but as it is all shown in this cheap animation style, it doesn't feel interesting. The minigames involve a shooting game where you have to shoot a snake with arrows into its cave; or a fighting game with controls that are even worse compared to Rise of the Robots.
I have to agree with HalfblindGamer when he reviewed this game over ten years ago: What were they thinking? The game is slow-paced and the story is rushed so you get hardly any immersed feeling with it. The minigames are slow and inaccurate; the controls are simply bad. The animation is fluid, I have to say that, for a base-case title the scenes are better animated as what I have experienced in Hotel Mario or Link: Faces of Evil.
