Game:

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (2010)

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Review

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N. Nash Homework 5

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West Review


Enslaved is an action adventure game that takes place in a post-apocalyptic world after most of mankind has been wiped out from fighting a war against machines. The game is loosely based on the ancient Chinese story, "Journey to the West." In the game you play as Monkey, a wanderer who escapes captivity from a crashing slave ship by following another escapee, Tripitaka, or Trip as she is called throughout the game. After escaping the ship, Trip places a modified slave collar on Monkey in order to compel him to protect her while bringing her home. The entire game is centered around this partnership. The player plays as Monkey with the assistance of Trip.

This game has a few exceptional features. The visual style is incredible, and the makers of the game managed to make a post-apocalyptic world look beautiful and haunting. There is only one element of the visual style that bothered me. The world and characters are rendered exquisitely with great attention to detail, but their cast shadows are pixilated and inconsistent with the otherwise high quality of rendering. This may seem like something small, but for me it removed me from the experience of playing the game. The game has a strong story with phenomenal voice acting directed by Andy Serkis, who acted as the voice of Monkey and is known for his role in the Lord of the Rings trilogy as Golem. The story also had a good plot. I think my favorite aspect of the story is the arc of the relationship between Monkey and Trip developing from a relationship of fear and enslavement to one of respect and love (thankfully the love is kept on an overt level rather than a blatant romantic level which would have ruined the story). On top of these strengths the game is surprisingly average. There is nothing wrong with the game, I thoroughly enjoyed playing it, but there is nothing in its game play to make it really stand out. The control handles well, and it has a good combat system. Its enemies are decent, but they lack variety and challenge. Your character gains strength as he upgrades his abilities throughout the game, but this doesn't do a lot to set him apart from the abilities he starts out with. The game has a respectable cinematic style, but the designers only capitalize on this in the first chapter, which is the training chapter. As I have said, I like the game, and it is not overly difficult to platinum and is fun to play, but it is just not an out of this world game. I rate it 3 out of 5 stars with a recommendation to buy and play, especially with its current reduced price.

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