Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

Review from Matt - Wednesday, 20 April 2011 @ 12:51am

Introduction

This is not a new game. You know it and I know it. The fact is I was planning to do a video review of this. In fact, I filmed two different video reviews, and recorded the audio four times.

It just never came out right. I ended up with two options - let it die, or put it up as text. To be completely honest I really like the script, and I'm pretty proud of it. I thought it was worth becoming public, though I wish I could have presented it as it deserves.

Very soon I'll be putting some money into more gear, and do a better job of video. Promise.

The Review

Enslaved is a joyous celebration of bondage and Stockholm syndrome from developer Ninja Theory, best known for Heavenly Sword, one of the better launch titles for the PS3.

The story behind Enslaved is an old one, one of the oldest, actually. It’s an adaptation of Journey to the West, a Chinese folk tale that tells the story of a young monk called Tripitaka who is travelling to Tibet to get Buddhist scripture. If the name isn’t familiar, you should burn with nerdshame, as the story was made as an insanely cult popular TV series Monkey. This TV series taught me many life lessons, including that a pretty Japanese girl and a pretty Chinese boy are interchangeable.

The story here has been twisted, stylised and dumbed down to a point where Even Disney would say they lost the spirit of the original. And that’s a company who made the kidnapping and rape of a 10 year old girl into a love story.

Monkey and Tripitaka, or Trip for the kids, are the main characters, and Pigsy makes a significant but belated presence. But Sandy the damp cannibal with the raddest of hair-dos is absent, and the horse (who’s actually a dragon who ate the horse and now feels bad) is missing in action as well. I'm not saying they had to have that in there, but it would have been nice to watch them try.

Monkey’s less simian than other interpretations, with stylised hints such as his dangling belt representing his tail. As he spends most of the game running around half naked, getting into fights, hallucinating and terrorising a young woman, for the remainder of the review I will be calling him Charlie Sheen. Pigsy is more overtly porcine, but clearly still human. I actually quite like his characterisation. The rather cervine Trip is more of a disappointment. She’s Heavenly Sword’s Nariko, plus Katy Perry’s absurd eyes and minus Katy Perry’s absurd boobs.

Yes. I said boobs. Close your mouth.

While the characters themselves are adequate it’s how they’re brought to life that really matters. This is where Enslaved really shines. Voice acting and motion capture are superb, especially that done by Andy Serkis of Gollum and King Kong fame. It’s some of the best I’ve seen in a game, but the thing that really impressed me is the facial animation.

Video game faces have long been oddly stiff, capable of little emotion, and certainly not complex or compound emotions. Enslaved takes its characters from a Keanu Reeves level of stunted emotion and goes right up to an Orlando Bloom. They're not too far from achieving something actually human. Things like frustration, embarrassment and resentment show visibly on the character’s faces.

The story starts with Charlie Sheen fleeing a crashing vehicle, and waking from unconsciousness he finds himself wearing the best bondage gear ever, a device that causes pain if requested by the controller. His Dom is Tripitaka, an escaped slave who wants to get back to her home, but needs Charlie’s help to do so. Charlie Sheen and Trip then team up and begin a journey home, like Milo and Otis, but without killing any puppies.

Very little of it is on a jetski thing. Thankfully.

While the character animations are fantastic, the character motivations are anything but. Like in real life, Charlie is a wild soul who burns with a lonely fire, avoiding complications in a world that isn't really ready for him. Yet he's basically enslaved by a young woman, and forced to do her bidding on pain of death. And his response is basically to shrug it off like it ain’t no thang.

Through the game Trip’s attitude ranges from domineering and threatening to weepy and needy. Once or twice she actually killed me because I got too far away. Thanks, you spiteful bitch. It’s like they couldn’t pick which female character cliché to go with, so they just put them all in together. And yet Charlie Sheen takes all of this passively, with little or no bitterness or complaint. I can only assume as well as the collar on his head there’s a smaller one on his balls.

Much like games such as Uncharted 2 and Prince of Persia there’s a focus on leaping and climbing around set paths. But the animation doesn’t feel as fluid and acrobatic as Prince of Persia, there’s just something jarring about the way Charlie travels, like his animations are all pre-canned. It also lacks the variety and cinema of Uncharted 2, with you hitting more or less the same poles and pipes and handgrips the whole way through. There’s also no challenge. Enslaved uses the patented Fox News control system, where it just leaps in a predefined direction, regardless of what input it’s given.

Also there is fighting. Quite a lot of fighting.

This same principle applies elsewhere. Charles can’t fall off things, he just bounces off invisible walls. The correct way is the only way, and even when it makes no sense.

The other major component is combat, and I’m undecided about its effectiveness.

Mr Sheen has a staff – of course... he wouldn’t be the right character otherwise. The staff serves as a melee weapon, with basic attack and a heavy attack. There’s not a lot in the way of combinations, though there’s a charge attack that stuns enemies, a wide attack that knocks them back, and some other features like evasion attacks and this big thing that builds up when you hit enemies enough.

The staff also fires plasma bolts, once you get some, which leads to some relatively enjoyable sniping sections.

Trip will upgrade you using collected orbs. These orbs are retarded, forcing you to run around to every corner of every map, rather than to your goal. They’re pointless busywork, and I resent their inclusion like I resent Two and a Half Men being cancelled because of Charlie Sheen's private life. It should have been cancelled because it's shit. If you want to have upgrade elements and encourage exploration, do it by putting useful things around, INCLUDING full upgrades, rather than by forcing us to trot to far-flung corners while Trip demands we hurry up or she’ll explode our head.

The enemies are exclusively mechs. And much the same mechs all through. There’s a guy, who I’m pretty sure is a bionicle. And this guy, who I'm pretty sure is modelled on Christina Hendricks.

See, they're red, and they normally hold their fists up to their chests before... forget it.

There are no mutated swamp beasts, atavistic human outcasts driven to madness or savagery, or any one of a number of possibilities that could have been put in in a way that was justified by the context.

That actual context is an interesting one. Everything’s post-apocalyptic, but it’s nice to see that interpreted in a way that isn’t brown. New York has been taken over by lush green vegetation, and the sky is a clear blue. What’s less attractive is the way the screen pans over these nice vistas. I don’t know what it is about slow pans but they don’t work in videogames a lot of the time. Maybe I’m more sensitive to it than most, I don’t know. But there’s more struggling, shuddering and tearing than a priest having sex.

Aspects of the story are left mysteriously unasked or unanswered. The reason for the apocalypse is never mentioned, but it does seem to be related to a robot uprising. What is the relationship between Pyramid and the Mechs? Why do “slavers” kill so many people? Why does Pigsy carry around infinite bombs that he can’t detonate? Why does Monkey have a Brooklyn accent? Can Trip actually get those giant squid eyes all the way closed?

Looking moody, but actually pretty cool

But what it gets right it really does do a great job of. The character and story elements are superbly executed, and they should be commended for that, though aspects of the story, such as the blossoming relationship between Charles and Trip are clumsy and contrived. I’d like to think that every game builds on a legacy of those that come before it, setting new standards for what can and should be achieved, and this standard, that of story and character, is something gaming is desperately needing. Enslaved isn’t perfect, but it at least tries to succeed on a higher level, and that’s both notable and commendable.

But it still has to be a game, and in the sense of being a game it’s terribly flawed. The leaping around and puzzling aspects of the gameplay feel roughly implemented. The combat, while actually quite fun, isn’t as strong as it needs to be, and lacks variety. Gameplay elements like the orbs just shat me, and stereotype gameplay like turret sections and a vehicle sections feel contrived and arbitrary, like they’re on the gaming checklist. These are awkward things that feel like they've been artificially created to fill in a hole. Like Charlie Sheen's porcelain teeth.

Pros

• Excellent character animation
• A solid story, with new DLC now available
• Something different and ambitious

Cons

• Actual gameplay is pretty flawed in a lot of ways
• Trip is actually kind of annoying