First Impressions: Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is developer Ninja Theory's third game (the first two being Kung Fu Chaos and Heavenly Sword) and in my opinion it could very well be their best. Keep in mind that I've only played the demo and all my impressions are based solely on the content contained therein.

The demo opens on the interior of a slave ship. The ship is appropriately dirty with rust coating most objects. Tints of jade adorn the holding cells in the room along with other pieces of equipment. Pipes line the walls and a single walkway is placed in the center of the room. Light shines in from a hole in the roof and makes the metallic rust green surfaces seem almost organic. Even the way the pipes in the back are placed make them look more like roots or vines.

 Monkey is locked in a holding cell and he's throwing a bit of a fit. Upon looking out through a small window he sees a woman successfully escape her own cell and proceed to a nearby console. She does something that triggers a number of small explosions throughout the ship and then runs off. Monkey's cell is blown off the wall and he's able to climb out. It's here the player takes control of Monkey and begins chasing after the woman.

Monkey, who's physicality is brought to the game with expert precision by mo-cap vet Andy Serkis, moves like his name would imply. That is to say: fast and agile. The character even looks a bit ape-like. He has a muscular build but isn't enormous like the oh-so-common space marines we've grown accustomed to and wears red leather pants with a sash that hangs mostly behind him (like a monkey tail). His hair is spiked up to a point. He's an interesting character and one that I want to see more of.

Moving Monkey through the environment is a cinch. His agility allows for perfect execution of parkour like moves as he jumps across small gaps and climbs, Prince of Persia style, on pipes and ledges. Most of which are highlighted with a faint red shimmer. All of this is done by guiding Monkey with the thumbstick and pressing the X button at the appropriate time.

After navigating through a few of the ships rooms, Monkey drops off the walkway and is nearly flung to his death as the back end of the slave ship (where he just came from) rips completely off and leaves him precariously hanging off of a girder. He climbs up the girder and moves through the destroyed segment of the ship and on to the next where he's forced to take cover as a combat mech enters and fires a machine gun in his direction, killing two other occupants of the slave ship in the process.

He climbs up yet another pipe and moves across the upper section of the room where he sneaks up on one of the ship personnel, demanding he tell him where his "stuff" is. The man tells Monkey he can't tell him. This angers Monkey, who then punches the control console behind him. The ship worker tells him where to go but apparently meant it when he said he couldn't tell him because almost as soon as he finishes a voice over the ship intercom states that he is to be terminated. His helmet starts glowing red and he starts screaming in pain but drops to the ground, dead, soon after.

After sliding down a pipe to a lower deck and acquiring his gear (a set of red gauntlets and an extend-able staff ) Monkey is ready to take on the combat mech. He rushes straight towards it, automatically deflecting the bullets speeding towards him with an energy shield and then destroys the mech with a series of heavy blows from his staff. He leaves the room and enters another, only to find tons of inactive combat mechs hanging from the ceiling. After remarking that he hopes they don't activate, several of them do. This is where the demo's combat tutorial kicks in.

Combat in Enslaved is simple. Square button for light and Triangle for heavy attacks. Pressing Square and X at the same time will result in a wide sweeping blow that does no damage but knocks opponents back while holding Square and releasing it breaks an enemy's guard and leaves them open for attack. As for defensive moves: Monkey can dodge attacks when you press X and a move the thumbstick in a direction or you can block with R2.

Monkey leaves this room of the ship (which at this point I realized was very much a "sky train") and finds himself locked out of the next section by the red haired woman from earlier. He climbs up the outside of the ship and jumps across segments of broken up wings. After moving across more of these platforming sections the ship flies by and loses a bit of wing to the Statue of Liberty's Torch. Monkey runs up one of the wings and rips a door off it's hinges and sends it flying into one of the nearby engines. This damage is enough to cause the whole ship to start flying sideways and Monkey is once again left hanging.

A sense of urgency is at this point forced on the player because the ship is very quickly flying towards a dilapidated Empire State Building and the wing Monkey is hanging off of will most likely take the full force of the buildings impact. Add to that urgency the fact that Monkey is trying to get to one of the last few escape pods on the ship (a fact I failed to mention earlier for whatever reason) and you've got one hell of a messy escape.

After making it off the wing and back up to a safer part of the ship, Monkey gets to the last escape pod only to find it already occupied by the red head he'd been chasing previously. He clutches on to the hull of the pod and pleads with her not to hit the eject button. Of course she does it anyway and the two of them are launched away from the doomed slave ship and off into the jungles of post-apocalyptic New York.

Monkey awakens with a headache and is told by Trip (the red headed woman) that it's being caused by the slave helmet she's reprogrammed and placed on his head. He threatens to kill her if she doesn't take it and she warns him that if she dies the helmet will kill him (much like the guard on the slave ship). Monkey is now Trip's slave and must help her get back to her home, where ever that might be, if he wishes to have the slave helmet removed.

Like many games, Enslaved is set in a post-apocalyptic wasteland. However, unlike those other games, the wasteland you explore in Enslaved is anything but a brown, lifeless mess. Much like in the History Channel's "Life After People" the world has taken on a lush, vegetation filled state and it's a real treat to look at something like this after playing so many games where the color palette is dull and lifeless. It's beautiful to be sure.
The characters, from what little I got of them in the demo, were enjoyable and I want to know more about them. The combat is fun and the platforming is very fast and fluid.

Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is coming out on Xbox 360 and PS3 October 5th of this year. Look for my full review sometime after that.