Enslaved
The reboot of Prince of Persia was a poor game that didn't quite deserve the power of its endgame and conclusion. But what made it work, for me, was how much character work there was. I stopped at every opportunity to talk with the characters, and that gave me the drive to see the game through and made me impressed by the conclusion.
Enslaved is very, very similar, but the core mechanics are stronger than in PoP. But not by much. I'm not entirely convinced that Ninja Theory understands how to make a game. I mean, they know all the parts and pieces, but they don't really know how to tighten those pieces up to make something worthy of 2010. The running and climbing work well enough, in that you can't fall to your death, but they lack fluidity. Frequently Monkey will run to an edge and stumble instead of jump. Or the next climbing point won't be immediately visible, so you jam on the A button while rotating the stick, which is fine in the beginning, but in later chapters, where you have to jump between fire bursts and rotating gears, you take a lot of unnecessary damage. There are moments of amazing fluidity, beautiful set pieces that are designed within the limitations of the game, like Ninja Theory understood what they were unable to do, so they focused on how to make that scene work. I wish they did it more.
Fighting is kind of in the same boat. This game would have either benefited from a targeting system like the 3D Zeldas or from a wider lens on the camera. You start the game with four attacks, a light, a heavy, a stun and a wide, push everyone away, swing. As the game progresses, you can unlock more, but they are rarely useful. You can get a counterattack that's a serious pain in the ass to use, you can get a dodge attack, which only works if the game rolls you away in a specific direction, and you get a powered up attack which is very useful in later levels.
But the fighting in general is very simplistic. If an enemy is blocking or has a shield, stun them then beat on them. Hopefully while you're doing this, another enemy won't be sneaking up on you from behind. If an enemy is attacking, block with your shield and hope it holds out until they stop, or roll away and hope you don't roll into another enemy's attack.
That's it. That's all the fighting in Enslaved. There are shooting scenes, which fare better, and there are some sneaking scenes early on that are fun and creative. These scenes rely on the most exciting mechanic in the game, which is the partnership between Monkey and Trip. They pretend early on that there is some very real risk to Trip, and that if she dies, Monkey dies, but she is rarely in danger and even when she is, it's easy to get to her and save her. I only encountered this danger when it was scripted, which honestly was refreshing. Build that tension in the narrative, not in the gameplay.
Trip has a few things she can do, like provide a decoy that will run for a short time and will then recharge. Early segments of the game involve using her decoy while you run around trying to figure out how to get to the turret. These scenes are fun and unique, and were probably the most engaged I ever was in the gameplay itself. Tragically, these moments only occur in the first third of the game. Once you get out of the city, the gameplay and its tone shifts to a darker, more distressed color and emotional pallet. Narratively I liked this shift, but it hurt the gameplay and actually started to overwhelm me a bit.
In an attempt to amp up the tension, Ninja Theory created levels that were more vague and featured more frustrating fighting. They don't really throw anything too hard at you, but they create situations that you know you can't handle (like having to fight enemies while something bigger and more important is happening in the background, or making you defend fucking power cores), but then they turn down the difficulty so you can handle it. But that wasn't fun for me, because I knew that a loss would kick me back to the beginning of the whole, irritating fucking things, so the tension was no longer narrative, it was now based entirely in my time management. A ten minute sequence I fail in minute nine means I have to waste those nine minutes again, unless I fail again, etc. etc. Enslaved seems to know it's being unfair and secretly eases up on you, which still doesn't feel very good.
And that's where Enslaved seems to be stuck. Or, maybe more fairly, where Ninja Theory seems to be stuck. In 1999. This is one thing that kept me from PSX and PS2 era brawlers: this sense of inequality between me and the machine that was supposed to be providing my entertainment. A game that worked so hard to be cutting edge but didn't yet understand what made a 3D game fun was more forgivable ten years ago because it was still new. But now everything is 3D, and the core of Enslaved toes that line so frequently.
And don't even get me started on the final boss fight... The conclusion to a level that felt like a transition but instead was the end of the entire game was irritating in ways I haven't experienced in years, with a final boss that just wouldn't stop happening, for no good reason whatsoever.
But. And this is a huge but. Everything that I initially loved about Enslaved is what kept me playing, what kept me interested in playing. I never got so frustrated I put the game down. In fact, I had to force myself to stop playing every morning. I frequently overshot my self-imposed time limits just to play "one more level". The game is gorgeous, the design is endlessly creative. The areas you run around in are beautiful and full of things to look at. And, most importantly, the story is quite good. It never quite gets to be great, but it is really, really good. The things that I found great were the nods to Journey to the West, which I know and love, and that certainly helped suck me in, even as the two stories completely parted ways about two thirds of the way through.
And, for maybe the first time in his career, Alex Garland stuck an ending. He faltered in the third act, which did admittedly worry me when I got there, but the story righted itself and created a very interesting and quite powerful final scene. It was here that, despite my frustrations towards the end, I wanted more. I wanted more game, more story, more exploration of this world.
I want a prequel, maybe one that follows Monkey from a birth or some sort and through the Uproar in Heaven. I want a sequel, perhaps now that Trip and Monkey have a scripture of sorts they can return it to the east. I want more of these characters and this story and these visuals, and maybe I want Ninja Theory to learn how to make a great game so we can have the game that they truly wanted to make but just didn't seem to quite know how.
Enslaved is very, very similar, but the core mechanics are stronger than in PoP. But not by much. I'm not entirely convinced that Ninja Theory understands how to make a game. I mean, they know all the parts and pieces, but they don't really know how to tighten those pieces up to make something worthy of 2010. The running and climbing work well enough, in that you can't fall to your death, but they lack fluidity. Frequently Monkey will run to an edge and stumble instead of jump. Or the next climbing point won't be immediately visible, so you jam on the A button while rotating the stick, which is fine in the beginning, but in later chapters, where you have to jump between fire bursts and rotating gears, you take a lot of unnecessary damage. There are moments of amazing fluidity, beautiful set pieces that are designed within the limitations of the game, like Ninja Theory understood what they were unable to do, so they focused on how to make that scene work. I wish they did it more.
Fighting is kind of in the same boat. This game would have either benefited from a targeting system like the 3D Zeldas or from a wider lens on the camera. You start the game with four attacks, a light, a heavy, a stun and a wide, push everyone away, swing. As the game progresses, you can unlock more, but they are rarely useful. You can get a counterattack that's a serious pain in the ass to use, you can get a dodge attack, which only works if the game rolls you away in a specific direction, and you get a powered up attack which is very useful in later levels.
But the fighting in general is very simplistic. If an enemy is blocking or has a shield, stun them then beat on them. Hopefully while you're doing this, another enemy won't be sneaking up on you from behind. If an enemy is attacking, block with your shield and hope it holds out until they stop, or roll away and hope you don't roll into another enemy's attack.
That's it. That's all the fighting in Enslaved. There are shooting scenes, which fare better, and there are some sneaking scenes early on that are fun and creative. These scenes rely on the most exciting mechanic in the game, which is the partnership between Monkey and Trip. They pretend early on that there is some very real risk to Trip, and that if she dies, Monkey dies, but she is rarely in danger and even when she is, it's easy to get to her and save her. I only encountered this danger when it was scripted, which honestly was refreshing. Build that tension in the narrative, not in the gameplay.
Trip has a few things she can do, like provide a decoy that will run for a short time and will then recharge. Early segments of the game involve using her decoy while you run around trying to figure out how to get to the turret. These scenes are fun and unique, and were probably the most engaged I ever was in the gameplay itself. Tragically, these moments only occur in the first third of the game. Once you get out of the city, the gameplay and its tone shifts to a darker, more distressed color and emotional pallet. Narratively I liked this shift, but it hurt the gameplay and actually started to overwhelm me a bit.
In an attempt to amp up the tension, Ninja Theory created levels that were more vague and featured more frustrating fighting. They don't really throw anything too hard at you, but they create situations that you know you can't handle (like having to fight enemies while something bigger and more important is happening in the background, or making you defend fucking power cores), but then they turn down the difficulty so you can handle it. But that wasn't fun for me, because I knew that a loss would kick me back to the beginning of the whole, irritating fucking things, so the tension was no longer narrative, it was now based entirely in my time management. A ten minute sequence I fail in minute nine means I have to waste those nine minutes again, unless I fail again, etc. etc. Enslaved seems to know it's being unfair and secretly eases up on you, which still doesn't feel very good.
And that's where Enslaved seems to be stuck. Or, maybe more fairly, where Ninja Theory seems to be stuck. In 1999. This is one thing that kept me from PSX and PS2 era brawlers: this sense of inequality between me and the machine that was supposed to be providing my entertainment. A game that worked so hard to be cutting edge but didn't yet understand what made a 3D game fun was more forgivable ten years ago because it was still new. But now everything is 3D, and the core of Enslaved toes that line so frequently.
And don't even get me started on the final boss fight... The conclusion to a level that felt like a transition but instead was the end of the entire game was irritating in ways I haven't experienced in years, with a final boss that just wouldn't stop happening, for no good reason whatsoever.
But. And this is a huge but. Everything that I initially loved about Enslaved is what kept me playing, what kept me interested in playing. I never got so frustrated I put the game down. In fact, I had to force myself to stop playing every morning. I frequently overshot my self-imposed time limits just to play "one more level". The game is gorgeous, the design is endlessly creative. The areas you run around in are beautiful and full of things to look at. And, most importantly, the story is quite good. It never quite gets to be great, but it is really, really good. The things that I found great were the nods to Journey to the West, which I know and love, and that certainly helped suck me in, even as the two stories completely parted ways about two thirds of the way through.
And, for maybe the first time in his career, Alex Garland stuck an ending. He faltered in the third act, which did admittedly worry me when I got there, but the story righted itself and created a very interesting and quite powerful final scene. It was here that, despite my frustrations towards the end, I wanted more. I wanted more game, more story, more exploration of this world.
I want a prequel, maybe one that follows Monkey from a birth or some sort and through the Uproar in Heaven. I want a sequel, perhaps now that Trip and Monkey have a scripture of sorts they can return it to the east. I want more of these characters and this story and these visuals, and maybe I want Ninja Theory to learn how to make a great game so we can have the game that they truly wanted to make but just didn't seem to quite know how.