Enslaved: Odyssey to the West

Finally had a chance to play Enslaved : Odyssey to the West, brought to you by the fine folks at Ninja Theory, aka the guys who made that bad God of War clone Heavenly Sword.  My impression on this game are based solely on the available demo on the Xbox Live and Playstation Network, that said if your demo can't impress, I really don't see the point in dropping sixty dollars on a game.  That's one thing I wish reviews who state, but then again most reviewers are given a free copy of the game to play so they don't understand how much sixty dollars is to the average consumer working minimum wage.

The demo starts with the main character Monkey who must race (while chasing after an incredible rude girl Trip)  across a mysterious ship towards an escape pod before the ship blows up.  As Monkey travels down very similar looking hallways the general control are given out slowly, there's probably two or three screen teaching you how to jump, follow that up with three screens of combats training and by the time the actual game starts I was so excited. 

It's too bad that the actual game is still boring, your literally fighting on the wing of the ship yet unable to knock enemies off the wing, nor does wind effect your jumping at all.  More so it appears that you can't actually fail from jumping, the game literally won't let you fail from jumping.  I understand that at times the need for an on-rails platformer but even still without any chance of failure why bother with the game play? 

As for the actual combat, it feels like an incredibly unpolished Dynasty Warrior game.  Each swing of the Bo-staff doesn't feel to have any sort of weight behind it and more times then not I feel like I'm just going with the same button combination to take down my foes. 

The game is also drawing rave reviews from critics over the fantastic voice acting and storyline, game is loosely based on the Chinese novel Journey to the West. In charge of the actual story and the lead voice is Andy Serkis who most everyone in the world knows as Golem from the Lord of the Rings Trilogy, I never bought into the little story I was given nor did I want to learn more about Monkey and his annoying love interest trip.

I'd say get the Demo at best, the only real thing holding me back from saying skip it is that apparently there's lots of cool features using Trip as a partner yet the demo doesn't offer any chance of seeing that in action.  If you have any joy in the demo give it a rent, I'm sure with the holiday season coming soon this game will be down to 40 dollars sooner or later.