(Wish I could find a better image. Oh well.)
Given the occasional mentions on the Wolfire Blog and this very forum, most of you probably know that Zeno Clash is a first person beat-em-up produced by a small, Chilean indie outfit who go by the name of Ace Team.
First impressions: it's good. Second impressions: it's good, but has some issues.
The bread and butter of the game is the combat. And the combat is good. In manages to strike a commendable balance between complexity and simplicity. The player is given enough options to keep things varied, but not so many as to be spoiled for choice. Also, the fisticuffs has a pleasingly visceral sense to it. Clobbering an attacker in the face feels about as close to the real thing as one could reasonably expect from a computer game, and you won't have to spend the next few days nursing split knuckles.
There are however some downsides. One of which is the weapons. It seems that these Ace Team chaps felt that they needed to add some embellishments and variety to their nice little combat system. That in itself is by no means a bad thing. After all, variety, as the old saying goes, is the spice of life. Unfortunately these embellishments ended up adding nothing but a sizeable dollop of mediocrity.
Allow me to go into a bit more detail on this point. In addition to his knuckles, knees and elbows, the protagonist can make use of about four different guns and two overpowered (and functionally identical) melee weapons. Sadly, the guns feel horribly out of place and the melee weapons reduce your options to 'click to swing'. What's more, you don't even have the option of ignoring them. Opportunistic enemies will promptly pick it up any guns you drop and, for some arbitrary and unexplained reason, heavily built enemies can only be defeated by melee weapons. Apparently being big makes them immune to either a bullet in the head or a knee in the nuts.
The last big flaw is the targeting system. God only knows why the developers thought a first person PC game needed one of those. That's what the bloody mouse is for! Anyway, selecting an enemy as your target will lock your camera on them and cause all your movement to become relative to their position. This could have worked if you were only fighting one guy at a time. As it happens, you will frequently be fighting up to seven opponents at a time. Having your camera lock onto just one of them does nothing but ensure that you get mercilessly blindsided by his six mates.
Now, you're probably wondering why I don't just ignore the targeting system altogether. Yeah, I wish. You see, landing a blow on any enemy causes that enemy to be automatically selected as your target. And to deselect a target you have to sprint backwards which requires two buttons and is extremely awkward to do in the middle of a punch-up. You get used to it eventually, but it's still like having someone gently prod you in the back of the head every 30 seconds or so.
Since Zeno Clash is by no means a bad game, I want to end this review on a positive note. So here it is: the art design. This game has a highly distinctive aesthetic all of it's own. The term everyone else seems to be using is "punk fantasy". That doesn't quite do it justice, but I really can't think of anything better. It's whacky, interesting and doesn't take itself too seriously. It's one of the few games whose visuals I could describe as "unique" with a straight face. Maybe it's just the sheer relief of finding a game that isn't full of grizzled space marines or chain mail bikinis, but I found the art direction in Zeno Clash to be immensely refreshing.
Well, as per usual, this post is way too long (Christ, if only I could be this verbose when writing essays), so I'm just going to throw a few bullet points at you and call it a day.
Graphics: Eh. From a technical standpoint they do the job. As mentioned above, very interesting art design.
Sound: Does the job, nothing special.
Voice acting: Uninspired. Not horrible mind you, just kinda flat. To be fair, it's probably rather difficult to find trained english-speaking voice talent in Chile so I'm not going to hold it against them.
Story and Characters: Well, I've certainly seen worse, but we're not talking Half Life 2 here.
Conclusion: Good indie game, some irritating issues, nifty design. $15 USD on steam. Demo available. Go have a look.
