Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

Stop me if you’ve played this game before. You play as a muscle-bound, somewhat taciturn Parkour enthusiast, on the run from an evil empire that just doesn’t understand you. Along the way, you meet your partner who follows you for the entire adventure. She doesn’t participate directly in combat, and doesn’t quite have the same freerunning skills as yourself, but it becomes clear early on that you won’t be able to progress without her help. Gameplay, then, is a combination of context-sensitive button presses that allow you to traverse the environment, using a variety of impressive-looking jumps and scuttles, and somewhat pace-y hand-to-hand combat against a variety of foes. All of this shown in gloriously well-realized, high-definition graphics that have a definite artistic style that, all in all, is probably done better than the “game” portions ever were.

 I guess everything old is new again, because Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is the 2008 version of Prince of Persia with a different coat of paint. They’re almost literally the exact same game.

 In the face of endless first-person shooters and third-person shooters, I suppose that Enslaved could be seen as something unique. Where the game succeeds is at presenting an interesting premise and world: in a retelling of the Chinese tale “Journey to the West,” you play as Monkey, a man who was enslaved (hence the title) by Pyramid, a giant robot corporation that has capitalized on the post-apocalypse by enslaving humans.

 The game’s specialty is its many awe-inspiring set-pieces, and these rarely fail to excite. Enslaved begins with a harrowing escape from a crashing airship. It’s here that Monkey meets Trip, another slave on the ship, who has decided that she wants to try to find her family down on planet Earth. This is where the game absolutely shines: instead of presenting a brown, blown-out, Mad Max-esque post-apolyptic wasteland, Enslaved takes inspiration from the BBC documentary (and book that inspired it) Life After Humans. The New York of the far future is lush, green, and overgrown with foliage and animals.

 This is literally where all that’s good about the game ends, though.

 Enslaved is somewhat emblematic of the problem of “cinematic” experiences in videogames. Namely, Enslaved barely qualifies as what I would generally consider a “game.” In between lengthy, and dramatically clunky cutscenes (especially in comparison to the “serious” films that it takes much of its inspiration from) that are apparently supposed to make us feel as though Monkey and Trip are growing closer together, the game feels as though it almost plays itself. It is literally impossible to die from a mistimed or misjudged jump in the game. It’s not like in Prince of Persia where you get picked up and get to restart from a close-by checkpoint – the game literally will not let you jump if there’s not a platform there for you to jump on. This eliminates any sense of freedom to explore the gorgeously realized environments.

 And after awhile, those environments reveal themselves as a mere façade: despite the ability to see great distances, the physical design literally funnels you towards your goal. While getting to your goal can be an interesting spectacle from a spectators point of view, as the player, it eliminates all agency to make your own way through the world.

 This “streamlined” approach to platforming unfortunately puts all of the emphasis, then, on combat, which is nothing more than some simplified button presses and overly convoluted animations, resulting in an extremely clunky experience. The fact that combat doesn’t become remotely interesting until at least halfway through the game is a major detriment to the overall pacing of the story that the game is trying to tell. It’s as if the developers kept thinking, “man, why does the gameplay have to keep getting in the way of the story?”

 And for all of its pretensions of telling a good story (hiring the screenwriter for 28 Days Later, and leaving acting duties up to Andy Serkis, better known as Gollum from Lord of the Rings), the game fails on so many levels at this. It’s hard to take this “human” story of survival and the bonds between unlikely partners seriously when the main characters are so poorly designed. Monkey is horrifically proportioned, looking like a refrigerator on steroids. There are many distracting shots of him putting a hand on Trip’s shoulder, and his hand is literally twice the size of her head. And Trip is straight out of the school of male-fantasia female character design, with an impossibly thin waist and big breasts, which the developers felt keen to show off in a skimpy outfit and lecherous camera angles.

 The writing, too, falls flat. There’s almost no characterization to speak of; the larger themes that the world seems to suggest are never delved into in any concrete manner; and almost all of the dialogue is either concerned with the direct matters at hand, or ham-fistedly with the overall conflict. Enslaved trades in survival story clichés, and the inclusion of a budding romance in the face of extinction feels unnatural. What about the premise for this game doesn’t allow Monkey and Trip to have a pre-existing relationship, therefore making you care about their mutual survival? Is it too much to ask that all of the plot developments, both romantically and in terms of action, don’t need to happen in front of the player? That implication is a much more effective way of conveying the need to care for characters, rather than spelling it out? But the game is too impatient to tell a good story – it just wants to get to the next bitchin’ action set piece.

 Don’t get me wrong – some of these set pieces are incredible to look at and occasionally to play. A boss fight against a giant robot dog is chief amongst these, but a couple of the stealth sequences work as well. And unlike Prince of Persia, you occasionally get to control the guns of the robots that are trying to kill you, and these sequences are satisfying, if derivative of every third-person cover shooter out there.

 I was so excited for this game. It looked like it offered something drastically different than every other game coming out this year, and I suppose that in offering up a unique premise for an action game, it succeeded in that respect. But the gameplay is so clumsy, so overly flashy, and worst of all, so unnecessary, that it’s ended up an incredible disappointment. At least Prince of Persia had the good decency to include some whimsy and some charm. Enslaved is much more content to ape that game’s mechanics to diminished results.

Note: this review was originally written in The Carillon, the University of Regina's student newspaper.