Enslaved is a third person action game, released in 2010 for Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 by British Developers Ninja Theory. The creators of past game Heavenly Sword.
Enslaved apparently loosely follows an ancient Chinese proverb which I for one have not heard of so the Story was totally fresh to me. You play as Monkey, a human male who goes from being captured on a slave ship, finally escaping but ending up as a slave to a teenage girl called Trip. Trip manages to get a headband around Monkeys head that makes him do everything she says and it is Monkeys Job to get Trip home, if Trip dies the headset kills Monkey. This leads to a strange relationship in the main characters.
The combat in enslaved is really solid. The melee is fun but is really basic so doesn’t really live up to games such as god of war which uses the same basis, one button for light attacks and another for heavy. Where Enslaved differs is that it doesn’t really have any combos to use so you end up just bashing the controls until the mechs are all dead. But the staff Monkey uses for melee action does have a firing mode which allows you to deal damage or stun enemies with orbs which does freshen things up a little. The camera angles at times do get annoying, the camera seemed to get stuck in vital parts of the game, in combat or at very tricky platfoming parts. The platforming though on a whole was fun but a little too easy in my opinion, the next spot to jump to appears red so you never wonder where you have to go next. But as a whole I thought it was fun but no where near the standard of games like Uncharted. Another thing that seemed easy to me were the boss battles, they were your basic do the same thing 3 times and the dudes dead. They also seemed to reappear allot too I think I fought that damn robodog like 4 times. But to kill the dog you had to use the cloud which is a hover board of sorts, which I loved, it felt amazingly fast and fluid, I was so excited to see cloud available on the screen that I think once a little wee came out (kidding I totally pissed myself). There is a hell of allot of collectables in this game there are the orbs which allow you to power up monkey and the masks. At the time the mask collectables seemed strange to me but they were tied in to the story at the very end. The game was basically a over extended escort mission and I have to say I hate escort missions but as a whole it worked ok there were times that annoyed me like when Trip got stuck on random obstacles but she seemed to have her uses more than she annoyed. Unless you talk about her character then oh my GOD she is annoying, she just seems to act like a whiney teenager for the former half of the game. There are allot of animations in this game that can take you out of the action and make you lose the flow of the game at times, like when Trip uses the Dragonfly to scan the area for mechs, yeah it helped knowing their location but surely there was an easier way did I have to see a short cutscene every time I went into a new area showing me the dangers in that area, I was getting sick of hearing “let me scan” about 2 hours into the game. Although there was one animation that I totally loved, when you kill the last enemy in an area the camera will focus on Monkeys face and it is legendary seeing the gritted teeth and his facial expression. Although the animations were a little annoying the cutscenes were extremely entertaining especially the one with Monkey, Trip and Pigsy in the escape pod. Pigsy as a whole was a hilarious character by far one of the funniest I have seen in a game.
Enslaved is not visually great, the Unreal Engine is starting to show its age with the texture pop in and all round average graphics.
In all Enslaved is a good game not great but good, to be honest most of the points above where small. The game is about 8 hours in length so I would recommend that you rent this one. Thumbs up! 7/10
