By Michael Lowell

January 7, 2011

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
Xbox 360, PlayStation 3 (Reviewed on PlayStation 3)
Developer: Ninja Theory
Publisher: Namco Bandai Games
Release Date: October 5, 2010

Look, I make a conscious effort not to shit all over game development studios.  Game design is tough and thankless work.  But apparently, British-based Ninja Theory is engaged in trench warfare with Obsidian Entertainment to determine which game developer can move the highest up the food chain while accomplishing the least.

Ninja Theory’s first major release was 2007′s Heavenly Sword, and “hyped to hell” would be disingenuous in describing the pre-release cycle.  The hype train should have been a warning.  You didn’t hear much about the combat system.  You heard all about the cinematic experience.  “Look at the beautiful colors!  Look at the Oriental architecture!  Look at our non-traditional, red-haired female protagonist!  She’s almost properly dressed!  And Andy Serkis is doing some voice acting!  You know, the guy who played Gollum in Lord of the Rings!  Buy our fucking game!”  And then everybody found out why Heavenly Sword was hyped as a cinematic experience: It was a prettier, shorter, more straight-forward, less-replayable iteration of Dynasty Warriors.  And if your game can be discussed on the same level the Dynasty Warriors franchise, you seriously fucked up.

And as the story goes, nobody bought Heavenly Sword.  Some did, but not enough to justify the planned trilogy.  So certainly, Ninja Theory was going to learn from their mistakes and gamers wouldn’t be fooled again.  Three years after the release of Heavenly Sword, Ninja Theory emerges from their cave and gives us Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.  And what do we got?  A colorful take on the “post-apocalyptic universe” motif dominated in modern mainstream gaming by the Fallout series; a storyline drawing its inspiration from Chinese literature; a strong-willed, red-headed female sidekick; and a main protagonist voiced by Andy Serkis.

Son of a bitch.  Ninja Theory fooled us again, didn’t they?

Earlier in 2010, Heavy Rain became a sleeper hit by convincing consumers that crappy game mechanics are perfectly fine if you “play video games for their storylines”.  Apparently, these titles are usurping a market once dominated by Japanese Role-Playing Games, which won their market share by convincing consumers to overlook the terrible combat systems and buy into the genre as a storytelling arbiter.  But even JRPGs required a modicum of thought, forcing players to lay the occasional firestorm into a couple of ice dragons.  In the era of “dumbed-down video games”, Enslaved is some fierce accomplishment.  Not many video games have brought together mechanics from so many different genres and strangled them senseless in the name of “telling a story”.

It can be partially summed by your early-game crusade to capture a robotic dragonfly.  Your female compatriot Tripitaka (quite possibly a rejected Nariko model from the Heavenly Sword development cycle) is pretty good at the computer hacking thing and a flying scout would be the perfect tool for apocalyptica.  It’s your job as unwilling accomplice “Monkey” to chase one down.  After a pointless, soul-less, skill-less goose chase, you’ve earned yourself a new weapon.  Trip will use the dragonfly to front the player overviews of monsters, hazards, and how to reach Point B.  And that’s not necessarily a bad thing.  Batman: Arkham Asylum demonstrated that kicking ass can be a hell of a lot more fun with a second set of eyes, where you could get the run-down on a corridor before even stepping foot in it.  But see, the player never actually uses the dragonfly.  It’s a conduit for cutscenes.  You know, “telling a story”.  If there’s a turret, if there’s landmines, if there’s a weak point, the game will tell you if it’s important.  It’s not your decision to make, because apparently, you are stupid.

Don’t want to believe that’s the way the developers felt about the players?  Look at the core of the action-platforming sequences.  They’re best described as “Gears of War and you ain’t got a gun.”  In these particular scenes, you need to guide Monkey and Trip through the environment, which are typically laced with dull metal constructs that inflict death.  Sound tough, right?  Well see, Trip can create a temporary diversion, a decoy.  In other words, Enslaved actively restricts players from thinking outside of the box in the name of “telling a story” and one of its core components is a series of cover-shooting-based puzzles.  Pathetically simple cover-shooting puzzles where the greatest threat to the player is trial-and-error.  All to go with pathetically simple puzzle mechanics where the greatest threat to the player is sheer boredom.  Apparently, Ninja Theory was too scared to push forward with the potential of the puzzles, too scared to make their audience use their brain.  (Not that the use of intelligently-placed sentry turrets stopped Portal from becoming a smash hit or anything.)

So what is supposed to be the selling point of Enslaved?  Though this statement is rather disparaging to the exploits of Naughty Dog, the platforming in Enslaved is best comparable to the Uncharted series, another set of story-heavy, cover-shooting-oriented platformers.  Well, Uncharted controls very well.  Uncharted preyed on every bad experience you ever had with crappy three-dimensional platformers, where you always felt at risk  that the game would let you down with sloppy controls or bad collision detection.  Uncharted asked the player to “feel out” for available platforms, using Nathan Drake’s visual cues to determine the correct path.  And sure, the climbing sequences were on rails.  But you could always hit the circle button and forfeit Nathan Drake’s existence.   Enslaved is the platforming equivalent of driving while drunk.  And in Enslaved, there is no amount of button-work that will get Monkey to splatter himself on the ground below.  And even when you confront one of those “the platform is crumbling” moments, the player can order out for pizza before needing to make his way to safety.  Nothing about Enslaved’s platforming elements make the player feel insecure.  Nor does the introduction of a “cloud” (think hoverboard) do anything to help this, an inclusion in a number of platforming segments that’s barely even worth a mention.

So we’re left to combat.  It’s roughly similar to what players got in the Onimusha franchise.  It’s straight-forward, it’s not very complicated, and it’s not very fluid.  That’s not necessarily a horrible thing, but it only works if you stack the difficulty against the player.  Onimusha’s solution was to draw from the survival-horror playbook, forcing the player to conserve his items.  Enslaved’s orgy of health drops and checkpoints are so numerous that, like most of the game, combat ceases to have any difficulty at all.  And just like Heavenly Sword, it’s incredibly Captain Obvious when it comes to combat strategy.  If an enemy has shields, guard break them.  If it fires projectiles, dodge them.  This wouldn’t be so bad if combat had any semblance of structure, where crowd control means something.  (Of course, given how disoriented the camera can become during combat, it’s probably a good thing the player doesn’t have to worry about his backside.)  Ninja Theory tries to add some depth with an upgrade tree, but it falls victim to “decision-making without the consequence”.  You’ll earn more than enough currency to acquire nearly every bonus skill, anyway.  Ranged weapons don’t make it any more fun, either.  It doesn’t matter whether we’re talking about the shooting elements or the game’s scattered rail-shooting scenes; the last decade of quality console-shooters is a carbon copy list of games that have done shooting better than Enslaved.

It’s simply maddening.  Every game mechanic in Enslaved feels like it has a safety net attached.  What other video games will restrict your run speed to build a more dramatic moment?  So that jamming the analog stick forward will force Monkey to walk side-by-side with her lady friend to soak in the words coming out of her mouth; to restrict the player to a jog because the current environment features no threat to the player?  The game is actively pre-occupied with being an “experience” and all of that combat and platforming is designed to be filler.  Well, Half-Life 2 was an experience.  Braid was an experience.  Uncharted 2 was an experience.  All of those games were pretty fucking fun.  Enslaved isn’t suffering from technical maladies, it’s just a game design process gone wrong.

Look at Enslaved’s beautiful game world.  Purely from a graphical standpoint, it’s an absolute change of pace from Call of Brown: Brown Ops, with blues and greens and bright colors and all that shit.  It’s quite similar to the art direction in Mirror’s Edge, which used muted elements in contrast with bright colors. And even though it’s the undisputed high point of Enslaved, it lends nothing to making the game fun.  For all the color, there’s no contrast.  It’s because of this art style that every climbable object has to twinkle in the sun, for fear that player would be at a complete loss in where to go next.  It’s because of this art style that mission objectives need to be overlaid with icons.  It’s because of this art style that Ninja Theory felt the need to include a combat upgrade that outlined color-coded states of aggression for enemies.  You know, because metal-bots-on-metal-backgrounds is tough to discern.  But even beyond that, the Enslaved universe is begging to be explored.  Ninja Theory wanted this game to be an experience, right?  It seems like they built this beautiful game universe and had no idea where the fuck to go from there.  It’s like they thought players would be so enamored with the initial impression of the environment that they wouldn’t care if it wasn’t interesting to explore.  Where are the environmental cues that sold the worlds featured in Metroid Prime and BioShock, where the player could learn more about the game world simply by examining a statue?  Those games effectively empowered players through exploration.  (Yes, freedom of exploration can do that.  Particularly ones where the entire environment is out to destroy you.  Hold your tongue.)  And what does Ninja Theory opt to do with the post-apocalyptic future of tomorrow?  Scatter the game’s currency throughout its hollowed walls and sprawling overgrowth.  And if anything makes me more curious about the fate of a destroyed world, it’s item-collection mechanics.  Yay.

Want to hear the one thing that Enslaved does right?  The game, after all, is a giant escort mission.  And we know how much people love those!  Well, Trip doesn’t do dumb shit.  She doesn’t run off and get herself killed.  If she dies, it’s totally your fault.  You could probably count the video game industry’s list of tolerable escort missions on a single hand.  Of course, it’s not a good thing when the best thing you can say about a video game is “it doesn’t fuck up escort missions”. Which makes it a shame that Ninja Theory was really set on this “telling a story” thing.  So don’t expect any cooperative play in your tandem-oriented, escort-mission, action-adventure platformer.  Or did I just siphon your remaining interest in playing this game?

I guess Enslaved can be surmised as such: It’s an open-world game without the exploration or freedom.  What’s that mean?  The philosophy of open-world titles like Fallout: New Vegas and Red Dead Redemption is that they can commit themselves to a master-of-none mantra by making exploration and an open-ended mission structure their biggest selling points.  Enslaved weaves a whole host of various genres together and doesn’t do them properly.  Then it confines them to a single set narrative and doesn’t do anything interesting with them.  Why?  Because this game was made for people who “play video games for their storylines”.  And I’m sure that will comfortably explain how come Ninja Theory has been commissioned to develop and create the next title in the Devil May Cry franchise.

Wait, what?

1 out of 5

(Games rated one-out-of-five have problems. Big problems. Unplayable? Possibly not. But even the target audience won’t find much to like.)

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Special Thanks To:

GameSpot’s Screenshot Gallery For The Pretty Pictars