henke on 5/10/2010 at 19:20
I just played the 360 demo of this and fell in love a bit. The gameplay is utterly derivative, not neccessarily bad but nothing we haven't seen before either, but the characters, setting and story are top-notch. The game is set in an unusually colorful post-apocalyptic world and the guy you play is the sort of spikeyhaired, musclebound, facepainted, dimwitted raider-type who might be a minor henchman in a Mad Max movie. But there's still something really likeable about the guy. He's proud. I found out after playing the demo that he's played by Andy Serkis so I guess that explains something.
Anyway, when the game starts you're trapped in some kind of containment chamber, helpless to get out. Through the bars you observe as another captive, a redhaired girl, manages to get out of her chamber and hack a nearby computerpanel which makes all kinds of shit start blowing up. I don't want to spoil too much of what happens next but the womantroubles of our spikeyharied numbskull of a protagonist have only just begun.
(
http://www.metacritic.com/game/xbox-360/enslaved-odyssey-to-the-west/critic-reviews) The reviewers are saying it's an 8/10 game
Apparently it's made by the dudes who made that Heavenly Sword PS3 game.
(
http://www.zavvi.com/games/platforms/xbox-360/enslaved-odyssey-to-the-west/10174148.html) And it's 40 bucks on zavvi.com
I'm ordering this! You guys should download the demo, if you have a 360 or a PS3. If you don't you should whine about how consoles are killing PC gaming. Alright go!
Nameless Voice on 5/10/2010 at 20:58
Consoles are killing PC gaming, clearly.
I saw previews of this a while back and it looked very interesting - a different, less "world of grey" take on a post-apocalyptic world. But... no PC version. :(
SubJeff on 5/10/2010 at 21:07
I looks great, no doubt about it, and the escape on the outside of the ship should have been epic.
But the gameplay was so, so dull without any sense of danger or challenge - no skill required. The Kotaku review pretty much confirms it; it's easy, on rails and the "platforming" sections are so forgiving as to be almost impossible to fail.
Shame.
I'll wait for other reviews and more comments/experiences from people who've played similar games but atm this looks incredibly disappointing, moreso because Ninja Theory did Heavenly Sword which has some amazing fun gameplay elements (and has Andy too!).
Sulphur on 5/10/2010 at 21:24
It's also written by Alex Garland and stuff. So it'll probably have a couple nude buttshots of Monkey, maybe along with some brief scenes of his wang hanging out before he goes postal and totally kills everybody at the end.
Seriously though, there's no reason for this to not be on the PC. It's made with UE3 after all. It's not like Ninja Theory can't click on UE3's 'Port to PC' button and ship this bitch on FreeBSD and OS/2 Warp on 5 1/4" floppies and let me play it without having to connect my 110 baud acoustic coupler to the phone line and pay a phone bill that's three times the cost of the game because of shitty DRM like Steamworks that lets me play the game only when it feels like it.
Fucking consoles. They're to blame for these assholes selling out on us deprived PC folk.
EvaUnit02 on 5/10/2010 at 21:27
Amen, Sulphur. Because of fucking consoles and DMCA, I refuse to join the military.
Ostriig on 5/10/2010 at 23:26
Saw a presentation by Ninja Theory's Tameem Antoniades at BAFTA last week covering the creative direction of this project, and how it evolved over time, and was quite impressed. Can't say I was too taken with what I saw of the gameplay, not really my cup of tea, but the look of the game on its own makes me wanna give it a shot. I'll have to spin up the PS3 and make some time for the demo this weekend.
henke on 25/10/2010 at 18:34
Quote Posted by Subjective Effect
The Kotaku review pretty much confirms it; it's easy, on rails and the "platforming" sections are so forgiving as to be almost impossible to fail.
Well I got it in the mail today and anticipating that it would be a bit on the easy side I started playing it on hard. The first mission, the same one as in the demo, was easy. But the second one did have some tricky bits. And the miniboss battle at the end of level 2 I ended up replaying 10 times before I beat it.
So don't judge the difficulty too much by the demo. That level is just there so you can get a hang of the controls and get you immersed in the story.
Thirith on 26/10/2010 at 13:50
For me, this is pretty much a definite once it's come down in price. I like Alex Garland's writing and the art direction is pretty different, added to which the reviews make this sound like a game I'd enjoy, though not necessarily worth the current price.
henke on 27/10/2010 at 17:10
I just got to the junkyard levels. Up until now the game's been really good but this is a major speedbump. Gameplaywise and plotwise. There's an on-rails bit which goes on for a bit too long. There's plenty of repetition of similar scenarios I've been through earlier in the game. There's a chasesequence which is frustratingly difficult. There's the introcution of an annoying comedy sidekick. And just now I'm in a fight against a demolitionmech and two regular mechs. Demolitionmechs are the hardest foes in the game(so far, at least) but having to keep your eyes on two mechs as well really makes things hard. I'm sure this fight is beatable, and it wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for one thing.
Every time I die, I have to sit though the unskippable fucking cutscene which introduces these enemies.
It's maybe half a minute long. I'm lucky if I manage to stay alive in the fight for half a minute. Which means I'm doing a whole lot more cut-scene-watching and cussing than actual playing right now. Fuck. I don't wanna give anyone a too bad impression of this game though. There have been difficult fights earlier in the game and there have been unskippable cutscenes but this is the first time they come together to form such a perfect storm of migraine-inducing clusterfuck. Here's some advice to everyone: don't play this game on hard. Stick to Normal. Leave Hard till the eventual replay.
edit, 4 retries later: still nowhere close to beating the demomech, but I had a thought about the other game I'm playing right now: Super Meat Boy. In SMB you'll sometimes end up replaying a level 50 times before beating it. And it never gets as frustrating as having to do this goddamn demobot-fight over and over again. That's because in SMB there's no waiting. A second after you die you're already doing your next run. To see an indiegame like SMB get this right, and a big budget production like Enslaved get it so horribly wrong, is depressing. What are all those millions of dollars going to? Shiny graphics? Didn't anyone playtest this motherfucker?
edit, after 2 more retries: ok, beat it. That was, what? 15 retries all in all. Not a huge amount but, fuck, did it ever sting.
Nameless Voice on 27/10/2010 at 17:32
Yeah, I really, really hate unskippable cutscenes in games where you can't save.
Prince of Persia: Warrior Within was a prime example of this - a forced, 5-second cutscenes every single time you died. You'd think a 5-second cutscene wasn't so bad, but considering that the game was fast enough to reload completely instantly once I deleted the offending files... yeah. Dead Space was another horrible offender with those disgustingly long and unskippable death scenes. Why do people do this stuff? :tsktsk:
