Enslaved: Odyssey to the West review

When I first heard about Enslaved I felt tingles everywhere. I have been a fan of ninja theory since i played kung fu chaos on the original Xbox. When I finally scraped together the ducats to get a PS3, I bought myself a copy of Celestial sword and again he was satisfied. Neither game is without its flaws, of course, but both showed a talent for creating games that has held my attention for years. There were comparisons to Uncharted, which is always a plus. Andy Serkis again helped with the cinematics. Sparkly. Enslaved seemed like my next favorite game, it finally arrived and I eagerly put it on the machine.

When the game started I was not disappointed. It opens on a giant slave ship flying over America. I am Mono, a man, as far as I know, who has been caught by the slave traders and is being transported to an unknown location. Suddenly, there’s a commotion and I’m accidentally freed, and through a tutorial-based opening section, I learn the basics on my way to retrieving my extra weapons throughout the ship. It is a closed environment. A long tubular ship that stretches for what seems like a mile, but the random explosions and insanity that happens make it feel bigger, more cinematic.

There is a girl, Trip, who is causing trouble for the slavers by hacking into their systems and messing with the ship. She seems like the obvious way to escape her, so following her is the point of the game. She has other ideas and blocks my path, forcing me out of the ship and along the outer frame and wing. Suddenly the environment is huge and open, I jump between flaming wings, fight mechanical enemies and let their destroyed bodies fall behind the ship now headed for an imminent collision with New York City. This is getting pretty epic. I finally caught up with it and the game is really chasing Uncharted’s tail for presentation and spectacle. I am totally sold at this point and ready to play this game.

As the ship crashes into several skyscrapers in this futuristic Manhattan, I fly free in an escape pod with Trip. She is beautiful and technically gifted, able to manipulate machinery and computers to her will. This is where I would like to take a moment to congratulate ninja theory about creating a game character that I can honestly say with a bit of embarrassment that I’ve had weird feelings about it that I usually reserve for proper human women. Well played gentlemen.

During the crash, Monkey is knocked unconscious and upon awakening finds that Trip has placed one of the slaver’s mind control tapes on his angry bonce and now he must do as she says, go where she says, and keep her alive at all times. moment. will kill him Women. My world is smaller, my world now exists in a limited circle around yours. My world is smaller and I feel it in the game. I couldn’t tell, reading that to myself, if I mean it in a good or bad way. Maybe it’s both. The feeling that you can’t go too far helps you immerse yourself in the character you control. His limits have become your limits, his limits hold you both back. The problem is that what I wanted to convey when I first spun that little piece of prose was that aside from the admittedly incredible and epic opening level, the rest of the game never quite has the wow factor that I was hoping for.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fun game and deserves praise, but Uncharted’s comparisons in gameplay and spectacle can only really be drawn on the first level. The rest of the levels in the games look good and are detailed and unique. Unlike most gray and brown cities of the future, this dilapidated New York is covered in vegetation, trees, and natural decay. Dilapidated buildings with trees growing through their walls and floors look fantastic and you’re rarely anywhere that isn’t open space. But it will feel like it is. Each environment has a direct line of travel through it. The edges of the game feel like the edges of the world. I do not feel as if he could go anywhere in this sprawling metropolis, even though as a player he wouldn’t have expected to be able to. The cluttered and dense environment is fine until it comes down to knowing where to go, the only solution the developer seems to have found is to make all the objects you can and should grab sparkle and shine. This breaks the illusion of a living, breathing world and makes you very aware that you are playing a game and the game wants you to follow a path. From time to time the environments get bigger and more impressive, but too often the most impressive locations appear in the background and are never reached during gameplay.

Moving around the various play areas is done acrobatically for the most part. Monkey is very capable of running, jumping, and swinging on things, as you would expect from someone with that nickname. His moves aren’t exactly what he expected when it comes to this type of game. He can do amazing things when the game calls for it, but equally challenging tasks become impossible if the game doesn’t want you to do them. I can jump from platform to platform, go up and down great heights, but if I want to drop off the edge of a certain platform into an area the game doesn’t want or in a direction slightly off the intended path, I find Monkey supreme. uncooperative. He just stumbles like he’s about to fall into a bottomless pit. It wasn’t exactly the high-flying trapeze sensation it seemed to be moments before. The other big problem for me is that there really aren’t more than a couple of variations on any move. Every time I swing and jump off a flagpole, I do the same backflip and grab with the same hand. Every time I jump from a handhold to a higher outcrop, I do the same two-handed somersault toward the ledge. Everything looks good for what it is, but it starts to feel very unnatural after a couple of hours.

All that said, I love this kind of cross-environment in games. It’s what made Uncharted great to play, it helped with the rebirth of the Prince of Persia series, people like it. Perhaps it is the admiration for free-running and the difficulty of that activity that makes us all happy to be able to control the action without having to learn all the moves or be in shape.

Aside from the occasional “boss” battle, combat in the game is pretty much the same throughout. Monkey has an almighty, unbreakable cane that he keeps on his forearm ready to pop at the first sight of a punk robot. Hammer the hit buttons fast and hard until the enemy is destroyed. Some enemies have shields, a charged hit should deal with that. Occasionally, they’ll come at you with a flurry of punches, block until it’s over, and then retaliate. If the enemy is too far away, he uses the staff’s plasma and shooting abilities to dispatch them from a distance. That is all. You get points by collecting tech orbs after kills or around levels that can be used to buff your attacks, protect health and such, but most buffs for combat don’t add to the basic move set and just add more. charged attacks and time-wasting options that you couldn’t really get past just smashing your megastick into the enemies’ robo-gut. Every time you clear the area of ​​enemies, the final kill results in a slow motion shot of your masterful dispatch. But this gets less amazing the more it happens, which is enough. I’m a sucker for simplistic combat in these types of games, but then again, there are only about 2 variations on any one move and not that many moves. Every once in a while you get a chance at a special takedown, but I only saw one version of almost all of these. The beauty of simple combat in games like Uncharted is that when they highlight an incredible kill, there’s a handful of different animations or it shows it from a new angle each time. This is not the case of the enslaved. Everything I really liked became pretty pedestrian when I finished the game.

The story itself was based on Journey to the West. Loosely based that is. It follows the basic plot but makes obvious changes based on the constraints or variations of the setting. The really cool part of this game, what sets it apart from a lot of these types of games, is the story. The way of telling it more than anything. The scenes really show the graphical thrust of this game. The motion-captured performances really make this something to hold onto. Andy Serkis returns as the main character and he does a fantastic job. There’s a slight blurring of the line between whether Monkey is a tough asshole or a caring thug who’s never really covered up, but that doesn’t even matter because you’re so transfixed by the acting coming from this CG persona. Trip, the voice and the character, is sweet and soft and totally believable when he’s sad, which is quite a lot. Then comes Pigsy, disgusting to look at but charming and funny. This is a shining example of what game characterization should look like. The care of these characters and the acting of the actors is as good as anything out there today, maybe a little better.

This is a good game. It’s fun to play, tells a good story, and tells it well. The problem has more to do with ambition than execution. They clearly wanted it to be epic, the first level and some of the later scenes show that. They clearly wanted movement and combat to flow smoothly and look dynamic. They missed the mark a bit, but the intent is clear and evidence of the ability to do amazing things is present throughout the game. I like this game, I think it deserves to be played and I think it pushes things that needed to be pushed. I just don’t think it has been executed to its full potential. I will continue following ninja theory and play the games they make. They are a study to watch because every new game they make improves on the previous one and does something that other games haven’t done yet, better than other games could.

Story: 4/5

It’s not that original, but it’s very well told and perfectly acted.

Playability: 3/5

The repetition gets a bit annoying, but it was still fun throughout.

Presentation: 4/5

Some of the game’s textures were a bit low-res at times, but the environments were dense and the character models were excellent.

Overall: 3/5

A great idea and obviously talented game creation marred by insufficient variation and diminishing returns on the show.