Enslaved: Odyssey To The West is a third person action/adventure title set on post apocalyptic earth. While post apocalyptic settings have become all the rage (what pun?), the world Enslaved presents is pretty much the antithesis of what we’ve come to expect. This is no brown and grey wasteland, but rather a world so bright and green that you may be led to believe someone has messed with your saturation settings.

Enslaved was developed by Ninja Theory, who you might remember from such games as Heavenly Sword. Personally I quite liked Heavenly Sword, though I gather it was a fairly divisive game. All the same it is clear that they learned a few lessons from their previous outing. In particular the pacing is much better in Enslaved than it was in Heavenly Sword. Heavenly Sword’s greatest strength was its fantastic characterisation. It had great facial animation, good writing and fantastic voice work (in my opinion of course). It seems to me that Enslaved only builds on this. Andy Serkis is back to help them out (by directing) and did motion capture as well as voice work for the main character. He did a pretty good job.

The story of Enslaved is loosely based on the well known Chinese novel “Journey to the West”. However, this adaptation of the story is set 150 years in the future, where a global war has all but wiped out human kind. Alas, there are still plenty of angry mechs in good working order. The game starts off with a bang (damn these puns). The protagonist, Monkey, is on a slave airship. This is where he meets a fleeing chick that doesn’t look to have much interest in helping him out. Unfortunately for him, the airship is in the process of crashing. Climbing around on the outside of the ship looking for an escape pod while zooming over New York is pretty darn cool.

After some stuff happens and one crashed airship later (I wont spoil it for you) Monkey wakes up to find himself wearing a pretty headband. Unfortunately for him it is of the slaver variety. The aforementioned chick, Trip, “gave” it to him. Basically it lets her command him (you). It means you cant get too far away from her without certain repercussions. It also means that if she dies, you die. However, as far as gameplay is concerned it mostly offers benefits. It means that you can always hear her speak, it lets her show you things in your HUD, and it gives you some other ways to interact with her. So it is that the duo set off on a journey to find her home.

The game follows the now common action/adventure game format of platforming sections broken up by combat arenas. Platforming is not exceptionally difficult. There might be a little too much hand holding for most people’s tastes. You cant jump unless there is something to jump to. You can only jump to other holds or platforms, usually of the shiny/flashy/obvious variety, and it doesn’t allow you to jump to your death. While the platforming is not exactly challenging for the most part (it does get trickier towards the end), the environment you platform through are very interesting and visually appealing.

The combat sections are standard fare for the most part. You have some basic heavy/light attack combos, you have shield for blocking and a not so great evade. Most of your fighting is hand-to-hand with the use of a futuristic bo staff. During a few sections and boss fights you also get to use a “cloud” (think hover board). I wish you got to use that more as it is really kinda underused. Your staff also has the ability to shoot plasma. You can pick up two kinds of ammo along the way, either standard or stun. For me the combat straddled the line between awesome and tedious. That might sound odd, but I think when playing it most would agree. Most arenas give you some strategic options and when everything goes to plan you feel like a badass. Unfortunately too many of the battles bog down and go on for a bit too long. There are a decent amount of different mechs that have different attacks and a variety of strengths and weaknesses. I think that most of them just require a few too many smacks to the head before they go down, so you tend to have a small army of robots around you by the time one gets destroyed.

Trip, your AI co-op partner is pretty cool for the most part. It could easily have been a ten hour escort mission, but she tends to stay out of trouble and helps out a fair bit. You can ask her to deploy a holographic decoy that gives you a few moments to run to the next cover spot. She also gives you access to the upgrade menu (most of the time) and can heal you. While you don’t strictly need her to be in the game for gameplay reasons, her addition is mostly for narrative purposes. The interaction between her and Monkey is really what keeps the game moving along and their evolving relationship is a big part of the game’s appeal.

This review is getting a bit lengthy so I’ll try and wrap things up. The writing and voice acting in Enslaved is really good. While some of the battles bog down as mentioned before, overall the constantly evolving environments and narrative keep things moving along and provides some variety even when the gameplay is a bit rinse and repeat. Graphically, its not exactly a stunner but it looks pretty decent for the most part. There are a couple of spots where the game struggled a bit with noticeable drops in frame rate. This didn’t last long and were outside of combat so its not exactly a game breaker. I should mention that I had a couple of issues with one particular type of mini-boss, that if charging at me and hits a corner gets stuck in an animation loop (and hitting him doesn’t do much at all).

Overall, I will say that I was pleasantly surprised by Enslaved. Going into it I wasn’t really expecting it to be much fun. While I enjoyed Heavenly Sword, nothing I saw on it had me overly excited. As it stands, I have absolutely no problem recommending it. I had a really good time with it. The story was pretty interesting, the environments refreshingly unique and it has a pretty cool ending. Play it.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 4th, 2010 at 10:44 pm and is filed under Games, Playstation 3, Reviews, Xbox 360. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.