The Blogtastic Blogfest That Is Getmeoutofthis.net!

It’s the end of the semester. I wanted to shoot shit. Bang bang bang! However, Gamefly just won’t co-operate! Even though the top of my want list is filled to the brim with shooters, they keep sending me other stuff. For instance, they sent me Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.

I guess I shouldn’t complain, as it was a really fun game.

Mechanically, the game left something to be desired. It was basically a traversal game, a la a Prince of Persia, with a similar level of combat and some stealth sections where you had to sneak around automated guns and take them out. It didn’t do anything that really revolutionized this sort of gameplay, but it was completely fine.
One issue with the gameplay actually related to one of the game’s greatest strengths. This game is drowning in the work of Andy Serkis, who is the voice of Monkey, the main character, and did most of the motion and face capture for everyone in the game, from what I understand. You’ve got a pro in there, and everything animates beautifully because of it. Conversations look real, to the point where they can use expressions to get their points across and accent jokes: no small feat in animation, and fairly rare in video games. However, because everything is so beautifully animated, it doesn’t always play smoothly. Walking, running, jumping, all of these have beautiful animations, but they’re all pre-canned, so if you accidentally do the wrong thing (for example, you aren’t close enough to an edge of a platform to leap to the next, and accidentally roll instead) then you have to watch the whole animation, and no amount of jamming on the buttons are going to help you get things done quicker. It’s a minor annoyance, really. The only time it was really a problem that affected gameplay was when it screwed me out of an optional achievement you can get for winning a race in game. Minor in the grand scheme of things, but had I kept trying to get that achievement, it probably would have really frustrated.
The only other problem, really, was a silly oversight on the controls. Left bumper is “tell Trip to do things” which pulls up a radial menu. However, something like 70 percent of the time, what you want her to do is use her decoy power. Tapping the button to use the decoy would have made a lot more sense, and you could then hold it down for the rarer commands. Instead you had to hold it down and move to the left every time you decoyed, and it was a little annoying.

What really sells the game are the characters. Again, you’ve got an acting pro behind the wheel, and the other voice actors for Trip and Pigsy are fantastic as well. It really shows, as the characters say very realistic things, and you really buy their relationship. There’s almost no repeated dialog in the game (there are a few, such as the warning Trip gives you when her decoy charge is running out, but I didn’t find that to be jarring or anything) and everything they say is entertaining and endearing, really. I never felt like they were “telling” me these characters were close. You see their relationships build, and that is awesome and just so rare in video gaming.

Note that I said the characters are great. The story… well, it makes a really ridiculous turn at the end. I’m sure it’s the kind of thing that sounded so high and artsy and deep on paper, but in practice, it was just kind of a “what the fuck?” moment. That is really JUST the epilogue, though. Everything leading up to the after the last boss cutscene is just fine, and powered by that awesome character interaction.

Enslaved is a game worth playing if you enjoy characters, story, and things like that. A little love for traversal games like Prince of Persia will help, too. Although a lot of the elements, looking back on them, are pretty standard game fare, the game really, really feels unique as you’re playing it, due to it’s art style, the fantastic animation, the voice work, and the interesting world that the characters are in. It stumbles a bit at the end, but the experience is great all around.