Monkey Business

Growing up as young kid I feel in love with a strange little show from Japan detailing the exploits of a magical monkey man, and his ragtag group of companions including a pig monster, some sort of water demon, a horse that’s really a dragon and a young Buddhist boy who till this day I still think was a girl.  The show was called Monkey (I knew it as Monkey Magic due to the opening credits tune), and it was based off an ancient Chinese story call Journey to the West.  As I grew up I always thought this would have been a great idea for a video game of some description.  Luckily I wasn’t the only one, and the good people at Ninja Theory decided to take this story, twist it a bit, and come out with a fantastic little game called Enslaved: Odyssey to the West.

Set 150 years in the future, you play Monkey, A loner on the run from Mechs and slavers. During your voyage you are enslaved by a young girl named Tripitaka (but everyone calls her Trip) who agrees to let you go free if you take her back to her home village. 

The game itself plays similarly to Ubisofts treatment of the Prince of Persia franchise. You’ll need to negotiate your way through a beautifully designed New York city years after a global war has ravaged the earth.  You’ll climb pipes, leap for hand holds and other such acrobatics while trying to reach your destination, all the while searching for floating orange orbs to level up your abilities.

Combat comes in the form of your magic staff.  The staff can be used to fire stun rounds, plasma rounds, or just beat the snot out of things.  It all flows quite smoothly, and although uses a fair amount of button mashing it feels instantly familiar to use.  Also worth a mention is Monkey’s cloud. In the tv series monkey whistles and a magic pink cloud comes along to take monkey where ever he needs to go. In Enslaved the cloud is represented as a flying blue hover disk that when you get enough speed on looks kind of like the aforementioned cloud. Its clever and really cool to zip about on.

The game itself isn’t particularly long, but at the end its quite satisfying.  You feel the story has been told, and the pacing of it is fantastic. 

There are some downsides though.  Sometimes the graphics get a little glitchy, and there are some moments of frantic button mashing, but these are usually forgotten when one of the many beautiful set pieces are revealed to you. 

One of the other things I noticed in this, which I usually don’t pay attention to, was the sound track.  The voice acting is superb, with monkey being voiced by Andy Serkis aka the guy behind Gollum. The music is also fantastic, matching the atmosphere of the game, without being too intrusive.

This game is defiantly worth a look, and if you’re still unsure I suggest downloading the demo and giving it a try.  It’s free and it’ll help give you a really good idea of what to suspect.

Next Week: Medal of Honor. Can EA topple Activision in the war based first person shooter market?