Enslaved: Odyssey To The West Review

Posted in Gaming, Reviews by Janx, October 6, 2010 at 3:54 pm | 517 views, 12 comments

Enslaved is a pretty fun game. Thanks for reading! See ya next time! YEAAAH!!!

…if I could leave it at that I actually would because realistically that’s all I have to say for my seven hours of playing Enslaved. Sure, it’s fun, but it’s also nothing new. The storyline is well put together, don’t get me wrong… I enjoyed it— but I mean, sci-fi meets fantasy with killer robots thrown into the mix isn’t exactly a new idea no matter how you twist it.

Then there’s the gameplay and style of combat system which are very similar to many other games available out there today… think Crackdown crossed with Prince Of Persia having sex with The Force Unleashed and using Uncharted for protection… or actually, don’t think of it that way.

The characters in Enslaved are as stereotypical and as unrealistic as ever these days in the video game industry. Their dialogues are top-notch though thanks to some Hollywood talent recruited by developers Ninja Theory, but that doesn’t change the fact that the main male character is still a hulking hot shirtless man who can seemingly destroy anything in the entire universe if he’s pissed off enough… and the main female character is a sexy young “thang” who’s funner to look at than listen to—oh, and ya… she’s also a “huge computer geek” as well… right.

Can we please stop pretending that any seductive young women would ever be good at anything to do with computers? Please? Developers? Please? Yes? I mean, nobody’s buying it, not now, not 150 years from now, not a million years from now. It just isn’t believable.

Anyways, let’s do this properly, I guess.

The storyline in one sentence: You are enslaved by a hot teenage piece of ass after you both escape from robots and then said hot piece of ass forces you to help her escape or you and her both die and you don’t get any poutine… and by poutine I mean hot dirty sex in-case you were wondering. From this point on in the game it’s as simple as fighting your way from A to B for the next five or so hours.

This is somewhat of a platforming game… and the platforming in this game is one of my biggest gripes. It simply doesn’t work. You’re not allowed to make mistakes and jump to your death. Instead, the game won’t let you jump until you have the right trajectory figured out. So, that’s no fun. I believe I reserve the right to kill off my character as I see fit, and having him jump an enormous distance straight into a brick wall and then plummet to his death is definitely the way I choose… but Enslaved doesn’t like that idea and doesn’t let you do it.

The combat is also relatively uninspiring. I mean, sure it’s fun to watch as monkey-man annihilates mechanical enemies with his bare hands in astoundingly acrobatic ways… but I’m not doing anything while that’s going on. I’m simply watching and pushing the odd button every once in awhile and that’s just no fun for the player.

Then there’s the game camera that simply doesn’t believe you need to see what you’re doing at times and feels you’d be more interested in “that rock wall” over there than you would be in your character who is fighting off killer robots for his life.

Overall, this is a fun game, but it lacks anything really great. If you don’t really feel like playing a game, but you want to play a game… you might enjoy it… but it falls into the same category as Heavy Rain and Crackdown did for me. It’s fun, but it feels like your watching an extremely long and boring action movie instead of playing an extremely fun game. My $0.02.