50 Games in 50* Days

The concept of this series of blog posts is 3 fold:

1. Play 50 games that I’ve never played before over (roughly) 50 days.

2. Write reviews of the games.

3. Select games on the basis that they’re cheap and offer an alternative to the cost of going out.

I thought this would be pretty cool as I’ve built up kind of a backlog of games and I wanted to play them as well as build up my review base.

*In all honesty, work is going to get in the way of hitting 50 games in 50 days but hey, it’s something to aim for!

5 – Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

Currently £4.37 plus postage from Amazon for the Xbox 360 version.

Women, eh? Can’t live with ’em, can’t chuck ’em off a cliff when they forcibly take control of you using a headband that connects the two of you together and will kill you if the connection is broken.

There’s a reason for Trip’s extreme measures to get you to help her of course. She’s found herself crash landed in an extremely hostile post-apocalyptic environment filled with killer mechs and dangerous climbs. She quite rightly assumes that the journey to safety is too dangerous to undertake alone; Monkey is enlisted against his will to help Trip survive.

It’s the classic videogame dyad – big, strong, gruff bloke with weaker, attractive and mentally superior woman. Trip thinks her way through situations, uses advanced technology to solve problems and has secrets. Monkey hits stuff with a big stick and climbs across awkward terrain like… uh, well, like a monkey. Both rely on one another’s skills in order to survive and of course Monkey starts to develop a Stockholm Syndrome-esque attachment to his sort-of kidnapper. Will their truce last and a relationship develop once Trip removes the headband and Monkey can do as he pleases?

Yes. Yes, of course it will.

Gameplay-wise this Ninja Theory title has a lot in common with the Prince of Persia series – all acrobatic leaps, simple puzzle solving and lot of brawling. The jumping and climbing in this seems to surpass even the Prince’s superhuman efforts in terms of its’ gravity defying landscape scaling. The environment of the world is very well developed and internally consistent (in that it could never function and makes no sense out of the confines of a videogame – but at least it’s CONSISTENTLY like that) and Enslaved is a very pretty game. Apart from the killer robots, the world looks very appealing as a giant adventure playground interwoven with intruding plantlife. The permanent pleasant weather helps to create a world that you want to spend time in as you play through the game.

The gameplay though, whilst competent enough, plays second fiddle to the story. Written by Alex Garland – the chap that wrote The Beach and 28 Days Later amongst other things – the narrative really drives you forward towards the end of the game. I don’t know if now the story has finished for me that the tale as a whole is as good as the experience of going through the story, but it’s definitely something I would recommend to anyone who has even a passing interest in films or games with story. On the easiest skill setting the game provides little challenge, so you could play your way through it in a weekend. A very cinematic experience, it’s the kind of game others can really enjoy watching you play.

One final thing to mention is that although your job is to keep Trip alive (or your head explodes) during the game, it isn’t one long ‘escort mission’. Although you do have to protect her at times, Trip basically looks after herself by standing out of the way or being stuck somewhere. So, like, thanks for that, Trip.

Bitch.