In Enslaved you play as Monkey, a man who lost his parents when he was young and has lived in the post apocalyptic USA about 200 years after nature has reclaimed the city. You meet Monkey while he is trapped on a slave ship, something the game never reveals how this comes about. You witness the other main character in the game, Trip, escape from her pod and start the slave ship on a collision course into New York city.
After escaping the ship you find yourself enslaved by Trip, forced to act to her every command, otherwise she will kill you. If she dies, you die. This leads to an interesting dynamic, but one that is actually quite glossed over in the game. Monkey and Trip become fast friends, only infrequently having dialog in the vein of Monkey's dislike for becoming enslaved. Maybe he just finds Trip so attractive (which she is) that he is willing to be her slave, hoping for some sexual torture as a reward.
Regardless of this, the dialog between Monkey and Trip reminded me heavily of the Ubisoft reboot of Prince of Persia. Interlaced humor and witty banter is quite prevalent. As both a pro and a con, you do not however have to perform an action button press to hear this witty banter, it is just interlaced throughout the level game play.
This leads into the second important aspect of the game, the game play. This I also found to be very similar to the Prince of Persia reboot, except that the parkour aspects of the environment were too easy to traverse. There was no chance of falling in most cases and it seemed to that pressing a direction and rapidly pressing the x button was effective enough in avoiding any potentially hazardous ledges that may fall. Combat was somewhat unique in that you use a staff much like Beyond Good and Evil, but that there was also combined areas of over the shoulder firing from your staff's plasma cannon. Overall, playing on normal difficulty, combat was very easy for the most part. There were very few times that I found myself in a situation that I was worried that I was going to die. Even less of those times did I actually die. I believe my death count throughout the course of the game was about 10. Most of these were due to miss understanding of the levels layout or a lack of cover when being fired on by ranged bots. This could have probably been avoided had I used Trip's distract action more often.
Graphically, I can not praise this game enough on the level design and artwork that really brings this post apocalyptic environment to life. I am however, a bit disappointed in the amount of texture popping that occurs during the cut scenes. The game was developed on the Unreal III engine and the age of the tech shows. However, I have played quite a few games on the Unreal III tech that didn't have this problem quite as bad. Perhaps it was an issue over texture quality and loading time. I would have rather opted for a longer load time and waiting for cleaner cut scenes than to see textures pop during the middle of a cut scene camera transition.
Overall, I was very pleased with the game. The witty dialog made for an enjoyable play through. It was far too easy as I had stated, probably good for someone who is new to the action/adventure platforming titles. The title is a bit short, however, there is a bit of re-playability as you can return to previous chapters to collect tech orbs and masks as well as re-attempt to beat some of the speed based missions for achievements or trophies. I would have to give the game a 7.5/10 though for the issues stated above.
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