We're back to socking bizarre chimeras on the snoot in Zeno Clash II, the hit (in more ways than one) Indie game from... 2013? How long have I been sitting on this review? All right, so full disclosure here: I had ACE Team's first-person brawler sequel on my list for the May feature I did this year, which saw me return to many games I had to put down over the years because my then-current system wasn't capable of running them at an acceptable level. A big, visually sumptuous 3D game like this running on the Unreal Engine where a stable framerate was an absolute necessity (since you're dealing with a lot of fast combo attacks) was producing nothing but stuttering which meant putting it on the back burner for a little while: that little while eventually becoming a whole decade and change. Since I already had another ACE Team game on that list—The Deadly Tower of Monsters—that led to me punting this thing to the middle of my IGotW queue instead and... well, here we are.

The story of Zeno Clash II follows directly after the first game, but its standalone tutorial mode cleverly doubles as a "what happened so far" recap—after all, if you need a refresher on how the controls work it's probable you've forgotten the story too—so that quickly got me back up to speed. Set in the peculiar land of Zenozoik, populated by humans and those of only a vaguely humanoid persuasion, the young warrior Ghat discovers that the entity that raised him and his many siblings, the androgynous bird-human hybrid FatherMother, actually kidnapped them all as newborns. Going on a journey to find his vengeance as well as answers, he awoke a strange artificial creature to the distant north: a being calling itself a Golem, capable of powers bordering on magic. Even though the Golem was friendly and assisted Ghat in his revenge, it proved to be a mixed blessing after it effectively took over Zenozoik's main city of Halstedom and started imposing law and order: a system of governance anathema to the anarchic citizens who relied on violence to solve all their problems. The sequel picks up shortly after, with Ghat and the formerly antagonistic FatherMother superfan Rimat teaming up to first free FatherMother from jail (another foreign concept) and then to figure out what to do about the Golem and its reign. As weird as that all possibly sounded, I'll confirm that the actual game is several degrees stranger. ACE Team outdid themselves with the world design here and the ten year gap between playthroughs was not enough to totally wash out the vivid memories I have of walking around this prehistoric nightmare world and punching bipedal boar monsters right in their multiple teats.

The first Zeno Clash went for a linear approach to its story as you moved from one area (and fight) to the next in a sequence contingent to the story it was telling. The second breaks away a little by offering a world that's a bit more open and has some side-activities here and there, including a collectathon that opens the way to a set of catacombs, an optional gladiatorial fight, and side-quests that revolve around the rest of FatherMother's children who all scattered to the four winds to find their real parents after the first game concluded. The second game also incorporates a more-involved level up system in which finding "skill totems"—usually requiring you explore a little off the main path—provided points that can be spent on increasing health, stamina, damage output, and "leadership". Your level of leadership determines the power of your allies, who come to assist in the larger melees and boss battles: Rimat is your constant companion in ZC2 (much like Deadra was in the previous) but a third slot is dedicated to your choice of additional follower. Most of FatherMother's children become followers you can recruit, as do a handful of others found around the world, with the strongest requiring the highest levels of leadership to convince. It's pretty handy to have allies in those bigger fights, if only to stop enemies from swarming you or taking you down too quickly in the case of bosses, though they have their own limited health bars too and will bail after too much damage (and take quite a while before they're in fighting shape again). Sometimes if you know a big showdown is on the horizon, dealing with a half-dozen small fry in the meanwhile might be something you'll want to try doing on your own.

The combat system is as elaborate as ever. Despite being the tutorial, learning how to pull off all the moves and effectively chaining them together makes that mode feel like the "lab" in a modern Street Fighter game: the type where it asks you to string together some 16-hit Daigo-level nonsense that's almost harder to accomplish than the main story mode. Most of your attacks are centered around the two triggers (or two mouse buttons, if you're M&K-ing it) which correspond to your two fists. Mixing and matching like in Punch-Out gets you the longer chains but it's after mashing the two together for heavy two-handed haymakers or incorporating sprinting and dodges that it starts taking on a more layered appearance. Many of your big showy attacks draw from a "super" bar that restricts how often you can use them, forcing you instead to depend on combinations of weaker strikes or the more technical approaches like the hooks you make from tapping the side-dodge followed quickly by a punch. If that's not enough, the game has melee weapons and guns—both are pretty fragile, but can make a big difference—and you'll even start acquiring traversal tools that have an equally vital role in combat. My favorite was a version of the Golem's tech that lets them link their vitality to your own—an ability that was key as the Golem's deterrent for the more violence-prone citizens of Halstedom—and you can use it instead to tag two enemies together to dish out twice the punishment. If a boss summons any adds, I always found it prudent to link the two and then wail on the attached mob since it was a lot safer than trying to land blows on the bosses with their formidable defensive skills.

Even if the combat remains fun throughout though, it's the truly alien world design and thought processes of its cast that are the stars here. I'd have trouble naming a game that went this surreal excepting perhaps contemporary eccentrics like E.Y.E.: Divine Cybermancy or Cargo! The Quest for Gravity. Barring the occasional Cruelty Squad it doesn't feel like modern Indies are taking risks on inscrutable narratives like those quite so often any more (though one I covered on here recently, Grime, did an excellent job finding a compelling core to its madness). A fan favorite set of characters are the Corwids: forest-dwelling madmen who are obsessively chasing one ideal or another, whether that's becoming a tree, embracing a towering inferno, or simply moving in one direction forever regardless of what stands in the way (pour one out for my boy(?) Oxameter). Nothing about the world of Zenozoik resembles the Earth we know, and even when the game is hinting at some post-apocalyptic business being the reason behind this community's current developmental roadblock the brief glance you get at the "advanced" civilization still makes it seem pretty outlandish. Giants: Citizen Kabuto is about as close a comparison as I can muster, but even that falls woefully short of trying to describe the unnatural ecosystems, architecture, and wall art of this universe.

Despite the broader world design Zeno Clash II does still feel kinda limited, with almost all its item drops being one-use restoratives or short-duration weapons in much the same way as it was in brawlers going way back to the days of Final Fight and Streets of Rage. The level up system is equally rudimentary though still sufficiently vital to survival to necessitate exploring each region carefully for the totems involved. I actually found the puzzles more compelling than the combat sometimes, making use of the Golem hand or a telescopic device which summons flames between you and the nearest celestial body that you point it at (either the sun or the moon works, since the slow day/night cycle might make solar power alone a little inconvenient). That brawling combat's real strong though, and its multiple techniques give you plenty of room to experiment during the game's modest 7-8 hour runtime and the many fracases you'll become embroiled in across that period. It still looks amazing too in its own wholly distinctive way even some ten years removed, which supports a theory I've always maintained that games haven't really become that much better-looking since the 360 generation barring some higher resolutions, cleaner textures, and all those ray-tracing bells and whistles I'm not sure anyone needs. More in the sense of aesthetics than technological progress; then again, this could just be me speaking out of my curvy yet paradoxically behind-the-curve ass and my ongoing resistance to forking out for a PS5 already. So, yeah, my final conclusion from all this rambling is that old games like Zeno Clash II are still good. Take that, Jim Ryan.

Rating: 4 out of 5.