You're Gonna Journey Farther West Than Expected

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is an entire game built around an escort mission, that manages to be really
entertaining anyway. Your character is known as Monkey, and he starts off locked up in an airship delivering him and others to be enslaved. One of those others is a plucky hacker named Trip, and she engineers her escape, and unintentionally, Monkey's as well. Trip's not much of a team player, though, as she refuses to let Monkey in the escape pod, so he hangs on to the outside. When he wakes up after the landing, he finds Trip slapped one of the slaving headbands on him, and he's going to get her home, whether he likes it or not.

The game play is a mixture of combat and I guess platforming. Monkey's not tech savvy, but he's strong, and he's agile. So you spend a lot of time climbing and leaping from handhold to handhold, to flagpole, to girder. It's not open world exploration, there's not more than two paths at any given time, and only one of those will lead to the end of the level (the other probably leads to a cache of plasma orbs, which you use to upgrade). It's easy to tell where you're going, since the next grip will have a glossy sheen that makes it stand out.

The combat's fairly well built, too. Monkey utilizes a staff, with a strong attack button, and a weaker attack button. You can combo them to a limited extent, and buy other skills like counterattacks and evade attacks that incorporate his agility into it. The staff can also fire plasma and stun blasts (if you have the ammo), and you can switch to that during a fight. The only problem is that when you do the camera shifts from a more distant, slightly elevated perspective, to one more common to 3rd person shooters (think Resident Evil 4). It's a good perspective for shooting, but the shift can be disorienting, not good in the middle of a tense fight. Short of changing the camera angle for the rest of the game, I'm not sure what would be a suitable solution, and it's not really worth that.

There are a few puzzles, but they're variants on turning switches in a particular order to align bridges or paths in a proper sequence. Nothing too complicated, but I imagine the more difficult stuff is being handled by trip off-camera. She's always using her wrist computer to do something.

A bit about Trip's role. She's the reason things happen, and you have to keep her alive. That's how the headband works, she dies, Monkey dies. The advantage is Trip is smart enough to hang behind until after Monkey clears the way. If that isn't possible, Monkey can serve as a decoy to draw fire until she can reach the next bit of cover. In a nice touch, Trip has a mechanized butterfly she can use to draw fire away from you. There are occasions where she's going to come under fire, and for those, she has an EMP she can use to buy you a few seconds to get your act together. Basically, the game designed so that the escort aspect is a plot device, a reason for the two of them to travel together, but it's downplayed as much as possible by the actual gameplay. Which is fine with me.

For awhile, the game was just mildly entertaining. I liked it, but it wasn't anything special. Then they reached the remains of one of New York's bridges, and the Cloud was introduced. Because Enslaved is drawing elements from Journey to the West (just like Dragonball), Monkey has a Cloud, some sort of hover disc he can use in certain situations to zip around and pick up plasma orbs, scout things out, or to get somewhere to flip a switch so Trip can cross. I loved that, just whooshing across the water's surface, racing up ramps and jumping to the next platform. I'd have done that all day if they let me. The only problems are that one, you can only use it in places the game designates, and two, you can't attack on it. No using it to weave effortlessly through a horde of mechs, swatting them with the staff, or blasting them as you fly by. Still, its a lot of fun.

The ending was kind of a dud. Bit of the Matrix in there, but what annoyed was I couldn't do anything. There had been an extensive boss battle to end the previous chapter, and I was expecting to have do some fighting inside the Pyramid. Instead, I watch a cut scene that went directly to the credits. I would have at least liked to have a choice, two different endings, something like that. At the end of the day, though, Trip made the decision for Monkey, which shouldn't be surprising, seeing as it was her selfishness that drove the game. She wants to go home, she shackles him to make it happen. She wants to go after the person behind the slavers, guess what Monkey? You're going, too. She hates what the mastermind's up to (or just hates the mastermind)? The whole enterprise is coming down.

Which makes the romantic subplot they gradually built up all the more off-putting. She seems to grow attracted to him, and vice versa, which should be sweet, with the rising music and all that. Except at no point do I forget the headband Monkey's wearing was put there by Trip, and enables her to control his actions. Or that she had broken her promise about removing it. Monkey might be willing to forget, but I'm not.