A game based on an old religious book (the Book of Enoch)… sounds exciting, doesn’t it? Yeah, if you only told me that, I never would have even looked at El Shaddai, but after playing the demo, I was pretty excited to check it out.

Even after playing the demo, I wasn’t fully sure what to expect so… read on and see if I ended up enjoying it or not!

Developer: Ignition Entertainment
Publisher: Ignition Entertainment
Date of Release: August 16th 2011
Platforms: PS3, 360 (PS3 version reviewed)

Genre: Action
Rated T for Teen

Presentation

Let’s start with this… El Shaddai is a beautiful game. There’s an insanely large variety of graphical styles and designs through the game. A lot of abstract looks and just strange color palettes and visual effects. And none of it ever feels out of place. It feels natural when you go from largely abstract areas with floating platforms (with cute marshmallowy creatures frolicking around) to, say, a futuristic Tron-like city where you ride a motorcycle and fight robots. It’s all very pretty and colorful for the most part.

Story

Major low point here: the story makes just about no sense. There’s various cinematics that just seem out of place and don’t really amount to anything, and the actual story just doesn’t make any effort in making you understand what exactly is going on. Basically… you’re Enoch (for the most part) and you’re going to fight/purify/whatever the fallen angels (Azazel, Ezekiel, Armaros, etc.), while simultaneously preventing the world from being destroyed by cuddly white creatures (the Nephilim). There’s a lot of random moments, very few of the characters are introduced at all or even have a personality. Sometimes you’ll find tidbits of text that will attempt to explain some things, or give extra backstory, but it’s rather tedious to find and their info generally tells you nothing useful. Overall… not a big fan of the way the story is presented. Maybe other people will be able to enjoy the very ambiguous story-telling here, but I really didn’t care for it.
Oh and if you want an accurate depiction of the mythology found in the original Book of Enoch, forget about it; here you have Lucifel, wearing modern clothing, talking to God on his cellphone (not that I’ve read the Book of Enoch, but let’s just say that it’s clear that they took a lot of liberties here).

And the story, once or twice, completely hinders the gameplay, like that 40 minute (or so) long segment where you’re doing nothing other than watch cinematics and making Enoch walk forward while the archangels (I think) are talking to you. There’s some boring fights in-between some of that, but it just gets tiring.

Gameplay

After playing the demo, I was expecting El Shaddai to be THE big hack n’ slash/beat ‘em up/action game of the year, as Bayonetta was last year. While not completely wrong, it is a little bit underwhelming. But I’m getting ahead of myself here.

The gameplay in El Shaddai is fairly simple. Kill a few dudes, get to the next place where you’ll be killing dudes, continue doing that until you get to a boss battle, rinse and repeat. The controls also happen to be super simple. Square and Triangle attack (both do the same thing, so choose whichever button you’re more comfortable with), X and Circle jump, L1 purifies your weapon or steal the weapons from knocked-out enemies and R1 guards.

Attacking seems overly simple at first, especially since there’s only one attack button. But it can get fairly intricate. Just mashing the button will pop out standard combos. If you delay your button press, the next attack will be a guard breaker, useful for those blocking enemies (they block a lot). Holding the button enables you to charge a counter attack, which gives you “super armor” so you can hit enemies even if they’re attacking. Holding the R1 button and pressing the attack button launches a special attack (changes depending on the weapon). You have the same types of inputs in the air as well. So you end up with a fairly good variety of attacks. Holding R1 and pressing the jump button with a direction executes a sort of dodge move, with each weapon having its own dodge (the gale’s dodge is the only one that can be used in the air, it goes further, and it does slight damage, for example).

You have 3 weapons to choose from here: The arc is basically a sword, the gale is a series of… things… that float close to you and rocket towards enemies when you attack (being mostly a range weapon) and the veil is a pair of super-strong gauntlets that transform into a big shield. Each weapon is strong against another, and has different properties for its attacks. You can also fight unarmed (as it’s possible for your weapon to get broken), but it’s not terribly good (and most enemies that have a chance of destroying your weapons are bosses, where enemy-carrying wisps will frequently appear anyways). Almost all the enemies you meet in the game will have weapons. The interesting thing here is that, if you knock them around enough, you can take their weapon, making them weaker and you’ll end up with a fully purified weapon as well. Knowing when to switch weapons is a pretty important element here, due to the weaknesses. Also, every time you hit and enemies, your weapon becomes less “pure”, causing less damage, so you have to find the right time in battle to purify the weapon.

One mildly annoying element here is that you can’t die. When you lose all your armor (you lose it parts at a time as you get hit) and then get hit again, you’ll get knocked out and die, but, if you mash buttons, you’ll come back to life with some of your armor being recovered. As you keep on dying your button-mashing will become less effective, making it possible to actually die, but you have to get “killed” like 6 times in a row before that happens. So it kinda feels like you’re invincible while playing through the game.

The game is broken up in 2 gameplay style. There’s the standard 3D action game as I’ve described already, and there’s 2D platforming segments. The 2D segments are… pretty amusing, but I feel that they drag on for way too long, and the level design starts repeating itself. The platforming is rarely challenging, but there are interesting elements and level designs here, like having to ride on nephilim and such.

One last thing I could mention here is the random boss fights. At “random” points in the game (not actually random, just… out of nowhere, with really no reason), you’ll just be walking around and suddenly get sent to a battle against one of the fallen angels… I never really got the point of that, since you can never beat them in those “random” encounters, it just serves to knock out a few of your armor parts before continuing the story it seems.

Overall

El Shaddai is a very beautiful game, but also one that presents its story in a mostly non-sensical way, making it hard to understand what’s going on (if anything at all is happening… I frankly can’t tell). On the gameplay side, this is quite fun to play. Despite only having one attack button, you can pull of a fairly large variety of moves to fit any situation but… after a while you do start just repeating the same attack patterns over and over… There’s very little reason that they couldn’t put in a second attack button and more varied enemies, you know?

I’d suggest renting this first. It may be one of the best action games of the sort this year (though frankly I’d put Splatterhouse above it), but it’s nothing really special as I was hoping.

jobocan Console, Games, ps3, Review, xbox 360