Enslaved: Odyssey to the West (PS3)

What a great game - we played it in 2010 when it came out - my best mate was one of the animators in Enslaved and he also recorded our first album so we ended up just playing it at his place while recording - it’s one of the happiest times I can remember. Bought my own copy just to play it again and man it’s still so good. 10 years later I can only say - GOOD JOB NINJAS thanks for a great game.

While the story was not anything special the game was fun the climbing and the platforming was different to what I was used to that being jak and Dexter or ratchet and clank games

Goods just as described and excellent service.

I really liked Enslaved and pushed through all the little niggles to actually finish it. The acting is great, Monkey sounds like Vin Diesel but very surprisingly is voiced by Andy Serkis, Trip is voiced by Lyndsey Shaw - familiar to anyone who watched Ned's Declassified when they were younger, and of course the ultimate hero - Pigsy played by Richard Ridings.A few of the elements will be familiar to fans of the 80's Japanese series - Monkey - where he rides around on a magic cloud, has a friend called Pigsy and of course a magic staff, but these are about the only resemblances that I can see.The story is the real strength of Enslaved as you get more and more behind the characters, following them from triumph to disappointment, success to narrowly averted disaster, this is just as well as the controls can be fiddly and the landscape disorientating. For example jumping should be straight forward but unless you are in the correct spot all you will do is a forward roll, this happens repeatedly and I suppose you kind of get used to it. Check points on the whole are quite lenient, though there are a few which set you back quite a long way if you get it wrong - the final battle is a good example of this, and further increases the frustration of quite a difficult section. The other issue I had with Enslaved was working out what I was supposed to be doing and where I had to go to do this, I had to resort to Youtube videos a couple of times to check.The game is definitely worth the effort to get to see the end sequence, which is very inventive and quite spectacular, and the journey there is pretty exciting too.Overall 4 out of 5 with a mark taken off for difficulties which shouldn't really have existed and detract from an otherwise top notch game.

I liked nothing about this game

If nothing else, you've got to give Enslaved some credit for it's premise. Taking the story of the Journey to the West and transplanting it onto a futuristic, post-apocalyptic Earth is a brave move. True, taking an old story and reimagining it in the present or future isn't exactly a new concept, but it's certainly new to see a western developer attempt it with a high profile, high budget title. It was quite a gamble on Ninja Theory's part, and one that apparently hasn't paid off judging from the game being considered a flop already. Shame, because despite some glaring technical issues, this is a decent game, but it could and should have been a great one..Playing as 'Monkey'(Yes, that's all the name you get), a prisoner on a ship filled with mysterious automaton soldiers who have been abducting everyone they can find in a ruin covered, desolate future Earth, the game opens with Monkey making his escape as the ship falls from the sky, leading to a pretty impressive opening level where you must navigate the large ship inside and out to get off of it before it crashes. It is during this escape that Monkey is knocked unconscious and wakes up in the ruins of a city with a girl called Trip standing over him, having just fitted him with a headband that causes him pain when he tries to disobey her and will kill him if anything happens to her. So, blackmailed into escorting Trip back to her home village far across the ruins and wastelands, Monkey has to navigate killer robots, crumbling skyscrapers, treacherous mountains and all manner of other dangers as he finds a way to get his new 'master' safely home. The plot is fairly well put together, with strong character development, an interesting central threat and a genuinely surprising twist ending that was quite satisfying, but won't please everyone. The strong plot and characters are the best thing about the game.Gameplay is not QUITE so strong, with functional platforming controls that owe no small amount of thanks to the Uncharted games, but lack any of the polish that makes those games such a joy to play. The game is fairly linear in layout and heavy on set pieces(eg. boss battles with giant robots) and is quite fun a lot of the time... However, there are a few sequences that are extremely rough and don't really work too well at all, most of them are the sequences involving using Monkey's 'Cloud', which in this game is a Back to the Future 2 style hoverboard you use to navigate over water and swamps and what have you. The controls for the Cloud are not nearly as easy to get to grips with as the standard platform controls, which aren't exactly a masterclass in intuitive control design themselves, and there are some sections that require you to line up and execute precise, well timed jumps with the Cloud that are so annoying and anger inducing I had to 'take a break' from the game on more than one occasion before I had to stomp it. This is all before you even get to the repetitive, irritating combat sequences, which are only one step away from mindless button mashing. It's a game that's long on ideas, and short on execution.The graphics are quite nice to look at, with decent texture work and some incredibly impressive animation, in particular the facial animations. However, the game has absolutely ATROCIOUS performance, with regularly dipping framerates and heavy screen tearing to a pretty distracting degree. It's a textbook example of a game that had more development time spent on making the game look good rather than properly polishing up how it performs. There have been too many better looking games on PS3 that haven't had the performance issues Enslaved does for such shoddy work to be acceptable.The voice work is deeply impressive though, with Andy Serkis in particular putting in a stellar turn as Monkey. The soundtrack work likewise is deeply satisfying and further shows how the game just oozes high production values. Shame those high production values didn't extend to the gameplay development is all.It's a decent game with some shoddy design work and even shoddier technical issues holding it back from being truly great. There's a lot here to like in terms of visuals, story and some of the platforming/puzzles, but there is no getting away from how the bad points exceed the good, thereby making Enslaved a game that just doesn't cut it at a time when there are so many high quality titles coming out on a regular basis.