Enslaved: Odyssey To The West
TL;DR: Don't bother.
Gameplay Gist: It's a 100% linear action-adventure game. You get to level up and apply points to a skill tree, but not in any way that matters. It's basically a movie you have to play through. There's a cut-scene, then a specific setup of enemies you have to 'solve', then the next cut-scene. No exploring, no choice of path. There is platforming stuff too, super simple.
Kombat Kuality: No. The fighting is bad. You fight with a staff and you have weak and strong attacks. But you don't mix them up in wacky combinations, you do weak, weak, weak, strong. And that is IT. You never do anything else. You CAN, but it doesn't do anything special, it's just individual attacks if you don't follow the basic combo. Aside from that, you can shoot laser beams at guys, but there's limited ammo for that, so you never do it outside of specific scenarios because you never know when you'll get more ammo. And since there's no re-visiting areas, or exploring, there is a fixed ammo supply. I hate that.
Story Stupid? Meh. Mediocre. Very very sexist story to be sure with the damsel in distress who constantly screws everything up, but otherwise semi-sorta-interesting. What's strange is that there is kind of a big twist to the story, but the entire twist is contained in the final cutscene. They really needed some stuff to build up to this twist (well, there are these flashes you get, and you wonder why, but that never builds up towards anything, it's just a total mystery until the final scene explains it bluntly). It felt weird. It seemed like any other game would have peppered in clues, and then had the revelation happen over the course of the final level in pieces, to make the final showdown meaningful. In fact, the 'final boss' in this game is basically the usual second-to-last boss of a game. Sort of a big showdown to get you into the throne room, where you would normally have an ultimate battle. Only in this one, there's no battle in there, just the last cut-scene. Last remark: the ending also kind of cuts itself off - it seems like it should have a big choice between one ending and another, but then it just picks one, and you never know what could've happened.
Wrapid Wrap-Up: I kept playing this game to the end. I didn't really want to, as the leveling-up is pointless, and the gameplay was never quite fun, but it was never bad enough that I didn't want to reach the conclusion. It did manage to pull me on with the mystery - I wanted to know what was going on. I was tempted to go to Youtube to find out, but finding the 'solution' to each battle was just barely interesting enough to keep me playing (the most helpful thing was looking in a FAQ to see how many chapters there were, so I kept thinking I was close enough I might as well finish). Not a
terrible game but truly truly a mediocre one.
Super Score: 57/100 Illogical Technologies.
