150 years in the future and the world has gone to hell and back. You are Monkey - a loner brute who was captured by slavers. After a bit of mech killing and explosion making you end up crashed in the ruins of New York City with a slave crown firmly attached to your dome because your new companion Tripitaka, or Trip for short, needed a guardian to get her back to her home town. You will play through 14 chapters of mech beating, wall climbing, and cinematic glory.
Gameplay B- This is a blend of hack-em-up Devil May Cry style play with a few added things, such as your teammate Trip who can do things like distract ranged enemies with her sparkly decoy. Once you pass a certain point, you will be able to upgrade your armor/weapons. Often times you will have to throw Trip across a huge gap or up to a higher level which never hinders the fun of your game and it is never very far out of the way when you have to deal with her. Fight mechanics are simple with light attacks, heavy attacks, and stuns for your up close arsenal. For ranged combat you can use your staff to shoot plasma bolts and stun charges. All the upgrades seemed to make it so Monkey could become the character best suited to your personal style of play. Where this falls short is that this game looks like a platformer, but when you play you will find you cannot fall off or jump off anything you were not meant to. So in the end you end up with the illusion of platforming. B-
Story B- Enslaved had a pretty good story. I mean, it was nothing you probably haven't heard before, but it had a good ending and great character development. Monkey and Trip develop a deep relationship throughout the game and that is probably what kept me going the most of all. Not the best story of 2010, but worthwhile to still play through it if only to see what happens between Monkey and Trip. B-
Sound A
This game had simply amazing voice acting. All of the characters kept me believing constantly never breaking their rolls. Monkey and Trip conveyed their opinions of each other very well through their voices and other characters I won't mention sounded great as well. Soundtrack for this game made my jaw drop, easily on par with Square-Enix titles. This is an easy category to review because it was so solid. A
Graphics B- This is my least favorite category to do because I think all 7th gen games look spectacular even if they suck. Enslaved looked fantastic, running on the trusty Unreal 3 engine. This game makes me wish that crappy, dilapidated, and rusty buildings could only look so nice in real life. The first 2/3 of the game looked and ran spectacularly - everybody looks amazing and so do environments. However, during the last leg of your journey you will start to be plagued by horrendous slow down, especially on the inside environments surprisingly. You see near the end of the game there are obviously going to be more enemies at once and unfortunately when you are battling more that about 3 at a time the game slows down to like 15 fps and it's really annoying. I seriously had to look up online if other people were having this problem because I played it on a 360 S and installed the game before playing. If not for this fact, I would have given this game an A because the only better looking games I have played are Crysis and Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots. But even in the most intense situations those games ran at 30 FPS. This game gets a B- for graphics, they look nice but don't always move nicely.
Replayability C- Umm, unless you were incredibly impressed with the game the first time, I hate to say I have to give this a C- for replay. It was fun, but it was also short and did not unlock anything for a second playthrough, except the knowledge of what to upgrade first. Unless you are an achievement hunter, maybe a rental would be best
Learning Curve A- Very easy to learn, controls are simple and explained. The only thing stopping it from being an A+ is that some things were not explained very well, counter-attacking for example,
Despite all its downfalls, Enslaved was in fact a fun game and I would recommend it. I haven't played the PS3 version, but after playing the 360 version I would suggest trying that and maybe you will enjoy it more. If you really wanted this game get it. But don't expect to play for very long. Oh yeah - play on hard mode the first time. It's not very hard, and anything less would be boring. Something about this game will draw you in, but I couldn't give it more that an B- because of all its downfalls and I feel bad for doing so.
