Enslaved

During the "Females on Female Characters" panel at PAX East 2011, Susan Arendt argued briefly in support of Tripitaka (Trip), a character from Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. This appreciation seemed bizarre to me, so the moment stuck in my mind. Enslaved was a gorgeous game with phenomenal voice acting, decently expressive gameplay, and very bad writing, of which I thought Trip was a prime example.

Monkey Don't Trip

HIGH The romantic art design.

LOW Fall-behind-and-die chase segments.

WTF Andy Serkis' face, in cut-scenes all over the place.

To categorize cinematic action games as intrinsically shallow or lacking in value would be the worst sort of genre-as-pejorative thinking. Their approach to game storytelling has produced many strengths, but one central characteristic of the genre is also a critical weakness. The great artistic limitations of cinematic action games come from their disinterest in the player as a creative force.

Uncharted represents not a new kind of game unto itself but an exemplary actualization of certain values in game design. Here I intend to put a name to those values and show how they relate to the characteristics of games in this group, which I think of as "Cinematic Action" games.

Not Quite, but it Comes Damned Close

HIGH Everything screams quality.

LOW Using the Pigsy Prod on a second-to-last attacking robot.

WTF Why aren't more pieces of DLC done as well as this?

Aspiring game reviewer? Maybe we can help. Chi Kong Lui, Brad Gallaway, and Richard Naik share their best trade secrets. Plus, our take on the best DLC no one's talking about: Enslaved's "Pigsy's Perfect Ten." Your host is Tim "Yes, Thanksgiving Was Like Two Weeks Ago" Spaeth.

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Games discussed:

• Enslaved: Odyssey to the West
• Enslaved: Odyssey to the West — Pigsy's Perfect 10

Please send feedback and mailbag questions to podcast (at) gamecritics (dot) com.

The first thing I played after formally ending my hiatus from games was the Pigsy's Perfect 10 DLC for Enslaved: Odyssey to the West. I don't want to say too much about it since I'm considering doing a quick review for it, but what I will say is that it was excellent from start to finish.

Monkeying Around in a New Genre

HIGH Activating Monkey's "cloud" for the first time.

LOW The end of the game doesn't seem to match the beginning.

WTF Trip shows no remorse for killing innocents in the first level.

Earlier in the week I sent out a tweet saying that retail games need more viable price points. I fully believe that the current industry business models in place are absolutely outdated, and a serious shakeup needs to happen in order for growth and sustenance to be able to happen in a healthy way. The reason I bring this up while speaking about Enslaved: Odyssey to the West is that (like I said above) it's certainly a good game and I'm enjoying it, but it doesn't feel as though it's worth $60.