Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (Xbox 360) review "Just add more homicidal robots - not the fix-all solution you've been led to believe. "

There are gaps between my three attempts to beat Enslaved. Long ones. We’re not talking about a couple of days or weeks while I poke at another game for a bit. We’re talking years. Multiple years. They’re the kind of gaps that are usually a death sentence for any hopes of completion, but I do eventually come crawling back to try again. There’s something about Enslaved that makes me want to see it through. Just as much as there’s something about Enslaved that makes me want to forget it exists for a couple of years or so. There’s so much it does right that often gets devoured by a culmination of the things it does wrong, arriving at a perfect apex of awful at exactly the wrong time.

I can’t tell you what spelt the end of my initial attempt; my memory isn’t that long, so let’s talk about the sudden end to my second. It was after a threat-free section where the two lead characters solve a number of progression puzzles by raising and lowering bridges. They were heading towards a human stronghold and the idea behind the bridges was that it took human intellect to figure out the logic behind them, trapping the roving feral mechs that inhabited the world outside their borders. This continued for most of the stage, but Enslaved isn’t content in just being clever; it has a combat system it needs to advance. So, at some point, there’s mechs you need to beat up.

Combat is not Enslaved’s high point. It makes attempts at elegance with a block system as well as some functional evade and counter attack options, but it all feels clumsily mashed together. Still, the bridge chapter is around the halfway mark, so it’s an issue I’d overcome throughout. I know why this stage was different. It’s the camera, you see, that’s squeezed so tight to your protagonist that it feels like it’s constantly peeking over his shoulder. This creates a weird sense of paranoia during battles; you feel like there’s frequently something metallic and angry lurking just behind you where you can’t quite see it, and you often feel this way because there bloody well is. The camera needs to back up and get out of your personal space – and we know it can. It zooms back out when you’re taking part in a spot of platforming, but it steadfastly remains clingy when you’re fighting. So you’ll get repeatedly stabbed and shot in the back by enemies unknown. It’s just, on this stage, you’re fighting on a very narrow strip of land, with little room to retreat or regroup. And there are two groups of mechs that rush you, coming from either side. So, in this case, there’s a whole group of murderous robots that you think are probably out there, but you can’t see them. I must have got slaughtered a couple of dozen times and then, that was it, I quit. Enslaved collected a few years’ worth of dust.

I’ve beaten the game now. I won’t pretend that I had a magical moment when combat suddenly stopped being shoddily and gawky, but I did have a rather intelligent moment wherein I switched the difficulty from Hard to Normal. Challenge be damned; what I needed was manageability. Seeing as years had passed, I started the game from scratch and passed my previous stick point in quick order.

It’s weird that combat has been made such an obstacle because what Ninja Theory really wants to do above making a game is tell you a story. Other elements, like the parkour platforming, are literally press A to win throughout the majority, giving you a linear set of handholds and podiums to navigate that highlight themselves with a fabulous sparkle just in case you can’t find them. It’s only in the last few stages that you’ll find any threat of failure or harm in scaling around building faces and up sheer walls. Until then, you’re almost embarrassingly protected; unable to even descend off the smallest of ledges unless you’re in the exact right spot and there’s something solid for you to land on.

Still, flinging yourself around the landscape does have an undeniable appeal to it. It’s pretty mindless for the most part, rarely offering you anything but a straight path that leads directly from A to B, but a lot has to be said about the environments. Playing at being somewhat of a trendsetter, Enslaved’s post-apocalyptic world thumbs its nose at all those other post-apocalyptic worlds (it’s a popular world!) that coat themselves in seven slightly different shades of brown and consider themselves gritty. Just be contrary, Enslaved’s broken and abandoned domain has been reclaimed by nature, the rotting skeletons of once great cities swallowed by climbing vines and acres of green. It would be kind of beautiful if it wasn’t for the constant reminder that humanity has been almost wiped out and the loss of billions upon billions of lives.

Sobering reminders of lives that once were are littered everywhere but rarely highlighted. They don’t need to be shoved in your face; they just exist. Likewise, neither of the cast needs to continue to discuss them because this is the world they live in now. It’s just their reality. Besides, they have bigger problems. Trip’s a teenage girl three hundred homicidal-robot-filled miles away from home. Monkey’s a stoic survivor who Trip welds a slave headband to so he’s forced to ensure she gets back home safely.



The plot is inspired by A Journey East, but don’t put too much thought into that; the developers certainly didn’t. One is a tale of an arrogant monkey king being humbled by safeguarding a monk’s pilgrimage through ancient China. The other is the tale of a moody muscle-head protecting a boob-tube wearing girl from Skynet v2 in the wastelands of the future. There’s mocking to have here, but it’s all pulled off with such a swaggering sense of confidence it’s hard not to buy into Ninja Theory’s world. A lot of the weight is shouldered by Monkey and Trip, who are so brilliantly realised they’ll ruin other games for you. Motion capture king, Andy Serkis, not only lends his voice to Monkey, but a lot of time and effort has been ploughed into capturing so many of the little gestures and facial quirks that are simply not present in the vast majority of games.

They falter, like you and I do, but videogame protagonists have a habit of glossing over. A passive aggressive dig by Monkey might elicit a tired eye roll from Trip, or a sudden spike of explosive anger from her much larger partner might pierce her tough-girl façade for a few moments leaving her wide-eyed in terror like a rabbit in the headlights. Their relationship is complicated; it’s hard, I suppose, to grow close to someone who has bonded a death sentence with your skull, so you can never quite centre on Monkey’s true feelings on the situation. At times, he seems pre-resigned to the fact that bad things will happen and he just needs to roll with it. Sometimes, he shows a glimmer of understanding towards Trip’s desperate actions. At another point of the game, Trip tries to alleviate some tension with a joke about how the first thing a free Monkey will probably do is snap her neck. Monkey isn’t laughing.

I suffered through Enslaved’s pronounced flaws because I found myself caring about the plight of Monkey and Trip without ever really realising it. That’s just makes Enslaved all the more frustrating; it stands willingly on the protuberance of being an truly excellent game, but then it goes and lets all that clumsy gameplay get in the way of it.

Staff review by Gary Hartley (January 21, 2016) Gary Hartley arbitrarily arrives, leaves a review for a game no one has heard of, then retreats to his 17th century castle in rural England to feed whatever lives in the moat and complain about you.