Giant Bomb Review
86 CommentsEnslaved: Odyssey to the West Review
4- X360
- PS3
by Brad Shoemaker on
Deeply engaging characters and mostly solid action combine in Ninja Theory's latest effort.
Monkey is a capable, muscled nomad making his solitary way through the wastes. Trip is a technically adept but fragile young girl stranded hundreds of miles from her secluded farming community. She needs to safely cover those miles and elude roving bands of killer robots, the remnants of the war that destroyed civilization. She needs Monkey. So she secretly fits him with a mind-control device that forces him to obey her commands and will administer a killing shock to him, if she dies. Naturally this fierce loner isn't too thrilled about obeying orders from an excitable teenager, but what choice does he have? It quickly becomes apparent that while Trip is technically in control of the situation, Monkey's the one with both the brawn and the survival know-how, and that creates some good tension and an almost playful back-and-forth dynamic between the two, as they scrape through frequent close encounters with the mechs, and learn more about each other in the process.
Actually playing Enslaved is largely like bouncing between Prince of Persia and God of War. From a crumbling, heavily jungled New York City to a mechanized facility run by the slavers who are trying to subjugate what's left of society, there's a lot of stuff to climb on. The game subscribes to the hold-your-hand school of acrobatic traversal, since it marks only certain background elements--loose bricks, conveniently placed poles and ledges--as climbable, and all you need to do is push the stick toward the next handhold and press the jump button. In general I have no problem with letting a game take the lead with this sort of mechanic; the weird angles and irregular spacing of the jumps you have to make would probably be a nightmare to accomplish with looser, manual gamepad controls. Though, if you're looking for a constant challenge, this isn't it; the platforming rarely demands expert timing from you, and only a few of these sequences near the end of the game really put you under any sort of time pressure. It's easy to do, but at least it looks really cool while you're doing it.
Lastly, there's an AI-only co-op mechanic that lets Trip pitch in and help you out when you ask for it. She can project a hologram to draw the mechs' fire away from you for a short time so you can run from one cover point to the next, and you can also pop up from behind cover and yell at them to draw their ire back your way, so you can tell her to move up to your position. Per action genre standards, there are multiple upgrade paths that let you enhance your fighting prowess, ranged attacks, health, and so on. I found the game did a good job of varying up the sorts of combat and action scenarios I was getting into so I never got bored with what was happening at the moment.
Enslaved comes right at the start of the busy fourth-quarter release schedule, and given the game's modest promotional campaign up to now, this review might be the first you've heard of it. But it's a well-produced effort that makes itself easy to get invested in and is worth considering for anyone who enjoys a solid dozen-hour-long, story-driven action game. It doesn't do everything right all the time, but some grander and higher-profile games could stand to learn a lesson or two from this one.
