Chances are by now you have at least heard of Zeno Clash. The game, developed by Ace Team and published by Atlus, was released on the PC about a year ago to a round of questioning stares and raised eyebrows. It has just now released on Xbox Live Arcade as Zeno Clash: Ultimate Edition.
“I’m sorry,” game reviewers would say, “but did you say it’s a first person…brawler? And it’s set in a world that seems like a mash-up between a Native American’s Nyquil-induced fever dream and a 1970’s David Bowie record?”
The answer to that is yes…and that’s about as close as you can get to describing the game in 25 words or less.
Atlus again takes a game that most major publishers would laugh out the door and welcomes it with open arms. They have a long and decorated history of taking giant leaps of faith when it comes to publishing obscure independent titles, usually with above average success. Demon’s Souls, 3d Dot Game Heroes, the Shin Megami Tensai and Persona series, Knights in the Nightmare, and now Zeno Clash fits nicely as another gem in their weirdly bejeweled crown of bizarre-yet-innovative gameplay and style.
So, the game. Well, again, it’s a first person brawler: triggers are your light and heavy attacks, and based on your direction and aim, you can change up to different attacks. It doesn’t take too long to get the basics down, which you really don’t need to stray from too much. Between getting ranged weapons and “skull bombs” regularly and keeping to basic punch combos, I found myself coasting through the Advanced difficulty with little problem no matter how many guys they threw at me simultaneously.
Aside from being fairly easy, the game is very linear. Think about your basic brawler from a 90s arcade cabinet, and that’s what you’re looking at. Run right, beat up 3-5 guys, continue running. However, and this is a huge caveat, the game does a magnificent job of camouflaging it’s linearity with some of the most brain-melting environments that have released in a video game that I can remember. A perfect analogy to this is Mirror’s Edge. You’re so enthralled running across drainage pipes suspended hundreds of feet over the ground that you completely forget that the game generally runs in a straight line.
Whether you’re defending a gondola floating in a river at the end of the world with Golem, who looks like a Mexican wrestler playing with a Rubik’s Cube (no word of that a lie, that’s all in game), or getting into a fist fight with the hermaphroditic entity known as Father-Mother, the world of Zenozoik is a vibrant colorful fever dream of weird, weird,weird, and you find yourself regularly getting mentally pummeled by the setting and environment. This game will make little to no sense, even if you’re reading all the dialogue and watching the story unfold, until the very end. I beat the game and immediately jumped onto the internet to try to try and figure out what in the hell had just happened, only to find a vibrant community getting into heated arguments over their interpretations of the game.
The “Ultimate Edition” of Zeno Clash for XBLA includes two series of additional challenges from the PC version of the game: Tower and Pit, each of which can be done single player or co-op. Tower challenges are a series of fights, done one at a time, usually taking about 5-6 minutes per “tower”. Fairly simple when done with a competent partner with a microphone. The three Pit challenges require a little more thought and are a little tougher. The objective is to defeat all the enemies in a vertical descent and reach the bottom without falling to your death. There is no break in between fights, so you don’t get your health back. Overall, all five towers and three pit challenges took Del and myself about an hour, and we happily cleared 160 gamerscore for our trouble (no achievement for beating the game- WHAT?).
Overall, If you’re someone who skips cutscenes or doesn’t follow storyline in games, this game probably isn’t for you; this game needs to be “experienced”, not raced through (says the man who raced through it over a weekend). While the gameplay and controls are mediocre, the game itself is a unique work of art and provides an experience you won’t soon forget.
Zeno Clash: Ultimate Editon (XBLA): 8/10
Altus provided me a review code for the game, and I played through the single player campaign on Advanced difficulty and played through the co-op challenges to completion.
Zeno Clash is great offering to the Xbox Live Arcade brought to use by the good folks at Atlus. These are the folks who I know best from giving us solid games that would be passed over if not for their apparent obsession with cult hits such as the Persona series and the rest of the Shin Megami Tensai games. You may know them from their big release last year that may have caused you to punch a wall called Demon’s Souls. This time they are bringing over a PC game and dropping it onto our consoles.
Having played Zeno Clash for the PC already, I decided to focus my time with the version with what’s new, and that’s the two player co-op portions. I did try out the single player to get a feel of what it was like with a controller instead of a keyboard and mouse, and that resulted in a little bit more control this time around. However, it was not completely flawless in that area. I constantly found myself yelling at Ghat the protagonist (awesome name by the way), whose eyes I was looking through, saying such things as “Hey, attack the guy with the bird face, not the pig man!” The controls are not entirely horrible either; they just take a little bit of time to get used too.
Once you get the controls down, however, you can have a blast going through the story, which is set in a world that makes the setting of “Alice in Wonderland” look completely normal. The plot breaks down as follows: your name is Ghat and you kill Father-Mother (who is your father and mother) at the beginning of the game. This causes the rest of your mutant family to get very upset and chase you out of the city with your girlfriend in tow, whom you end up having to explain the back story too through a series of flashbacks where in you fight a number of colorful characters until you get her caught up to speed. Fairly cut and dry story (editor’s note: are you kidding me? ROFLcopter), but what makes the game unique is the combat, which is primarily first person melee, which works really well.
The combat really shines in the new modes, which are co op challenges, and are where you end up getting the majority of your achievement. Zeno Clash gives you eight challenge maps to fight through, five ”tower” challenges, which are simply fighting a series of waves of baddies from the story until you get to the top of the tower, and three pit challenges, which are essentially making your way to the bottom of a pit while trying to not fall to your death simultaneously avoiding mutant bad guys. That being said, these are pretty easy challenges to work through, our benevolent leader Shanghai Six and I managed to get them done in about an hour, and about 15 minutes of that was fighting through pit three ($%# you pit three, die in a fire!). All of that being said, it is a solid game, which is to be expected from Atlus, however, check out the trial first to determine whether or not to spend the 1200 points of our future world currency (I’m not crazy, I know it was you Bill Gates that made the market drop the other day).
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