If you were to count the number of First Person Shooters (FPS) on any console, and then compare it to every other game on the system, chances are there'd still be more FPS's. Its like the chick flick of the games world - its an incredible overpopulated genre, and that means in order to stand out, any newcomers need some kind of gimmick. Mirror's Edge almost pulled it off, with it's free-running platforming taking centre stage, and the combat playing second fiddle.
Zeno Clash then, is an FPS with a difference. The guns are rare (and terrible), so most of the shooting is done with your fists. So technically, it's not a First Person Shooter at all, but a First Person Beat 'Em Up (FPBEU).
The game starts with a gruff voiced masked man teaching you the basics of combat, starting with the somewhat sick act of kicking chickens, before building up to punching the man himself in the face with a combination of rights. Then your character (Ghat) wakes up, and it turns out that you're on the run from your brothers and sisters, who are trying to take you down because for some unknown reason you've just eliminated your own mother (Well, she's actually called Father-Mother, and this turns out to be rather integral to the plot), and as such, they all want you dead. Strangely, one of them has the head of a chicken, and bellows the occassional "Caaawww!" before he's defeated.
Each fight starts with a screen like this, to tell you who you're beating up. There's chicken boy, at the top (on the right, obviously. That's you on the left). Caaaawwww!
It would've been better if everyone spoke in chicken, because the English language voice acting is pretty poor. Your female companion who's chosen to assist your escape speaks every line with the same monotonous tone, whether it's an emotional "You'll be killed!" or a "Feed me, I'm hungry", and the masked man who takes you through the tutorial missions requires subtitles to actually understand him (these can be turned on in the options menu before starting the game).
Biff
The voice-acting and the story aren't really the main focus of Zeno Clash (if they were, it'd be one of the worst games on the marketplace, second only to Limbo), and it's the hand-to-hand combat that's really what the game is all about. It's decidedly simple to use initially - pull the right trigger once to punch once, hold the trigger to do a 3 punch combo. Hold the left trigger to charge up a single, devastating punch, and press A to block. There are also numerous counters you can do while dodging, but you really don't need to worry about those. The one thing that's really missing is a jump button, as Ghat always remains rather depressingly glued to the floor unless a heavy enemy has just knocked him over.
But while the melee combat is fairly enjoyable, they seem to have neglected the gunplay. This isn't a problem for the most part, but there's a mission later on in the game where you need to use a gun in order to shoot a man off the top of a Seussian dinosaur thing. This tiny section is incredibly frustrating, partly because the guns are so... useless (You don't reload automatically, so once you've used all the bullets in the clip you just stand there clicking at whatever is in your line of sight), and partly because the dinosaur mounted man also deploys kamikaze squirrels, which are almost impossible to take care of swiftly (a slight kick will stop the explosive barrel on the squirrel's back from detonating, but they're wriggly little beasts).
Thankfully, you don't see many of these. The guns, I mean, not the little dog thing that's hurling itself at you.
If you get bored of the story mode, or just get fed up with the dinosaur man squirrel boss, there's also a challenge mode that you can take on with either another player in split-screen, or a distant friend (or a complete stranger) over Xbox Live. You can pick from either Pit or Tower mode, depending on whether or not you want to climb up or down to victory. Tower mode is more straightforward, with waves of enemies attacking you on each floor as you battle to the top, whereas pit mode also throws in some environmental challenges as well as the waves of enemies. Some of the stages in Tower mode also feature snipers, who stand out of reach and shoot at you, so it takes some pretty inventive bomb-work to take them out. With the enemies getting progressively harder each floor and each level, and with no checkpoints along the way, it'll take a new player a bit of practise before they're good enough to finish it.
Unfortunately though, that's the only replay value the game seems to have, there's no reason to go back and play through the story mode a second time, and if you're not a high-score monster then the challenge mode won't really appeal to you either, which makes it pretty hard to justify the price tag, even though the game looks like a full price release. If you're a fan of Beat 'Em Ups or high scores, give it a go, but for everyone else, you're probably best waiting for it to come down in price.
Format Reviewed: Xbox 360
