Summer Replay: Enslaved Odyssey To The West (8/10)

Enslaved: Odyssey To The West comes surprisingly close to being a defining cinematic video gaming experience. The story is immediately engrossing, the graphics impressive and the overall presentation at a high level. Gameplay doesn't let the side down either, fluent and pleasingly progressive, although it is fairly linear, showcased by the first level and so later hampering the seemingly open-world vistas we're supposedly free to explore. Where Enslaved falls down quickly is in its unwillingness to innovate beyond other platformers, often reusing tired stealth-combat (fighting and/or shooting) sequences or the same objective to climb to multiple times in a level. And when we've got fifteen levels to plough through, each at 30-45 minutes, said repetition gets very noticable and offers an increasing reason not to play the game while the story thankfully does the opposite. So all in all, it's a trade-up: the story of Trip and her prisoner Monkey is emotive and empathetic, beautifully brought to life by developer Ninja Theory and the animators, but the gameplay itself gets repetitive and gets tedious quickly, never a good sign. Enslaved: Odyssey To The West had a lot of potential, though, and thus I wouldn't mind a sequel if the script writers and developers chose to get a bit more creative.