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Thursday 21 February, 2008
Gameplay:
My second gameplay experience was much less fruitful then my initial gameplay experience was. I hadn’t saved the game, seeing as it probably doesn’t give you the opportunity to do so until the end of your battle with the first colossus. It took me very little time to find the first colossus again, but defeating it is a different story. I actually was unsuccessful at defeating him within the next 45 minutes.
I don’t have many assertions about this game because I was unable to defeat the colossus. You can find the first colossus within two minutes of the start of the game. From what I gather he is the first enemy that you must defeat. I still have not met any other living creature in this world. My entire experience consists of riding Argo around and fighting the colossus, and oh yeah, climbing some cliffs.
While fighting the first colossus the player is suppose to jump onto the giant's legs and start hacking at them with their sword but I found it very difficult to grab on and do this. Even if I did manage to grab a hold of the creature's legs I always seemed to fall off fairly quickly. Also there is the matter of accidently landing under the foot of this beast. If it happens then you are pretty much toast, and almost all your life gets depleted. You can try evading for a while and this regenerates your life but without a sure way of landing on the creature, you are still left with very little to do except die.
Not to fun so far.
Design:
From what I have seen of the game, it has many innovative elements. The artwork has a very aesthetic feel to it. It lends itself to the feeling of the game. It is full of dark colors, then offset by bright light. This artwork could have been created in this way so that the storyline seemed more tangible. So that you can real feel the darkness of the game. Another innovative feature is the sword mechanic. I have never before seen a game require light as a compass. While it does take a sec to figure out that you must be facing in the correct direction to have the beams of light converge, it is still a cool mechanic.
The fact that there seems to be nobody else in the world besides you and the colossi is also an innovative feature, but I would argue that this feature is not a good feature. The designers probably thought that this would create a stronger connection to the main storyline, by doing away with all distractions except your main goals, but it just made the game boring for me. I tried to defeat the first enemy several times and was unsuccessful. While this is probably more my fault then the games, the difficulty level of the game makes it more of frustrating experience. The game does not lend itself too less experienced players.
From what I have seen, of the game, it is not a game that contains levels, although it is a game of progression.
The game creates conflict around the main storyline, the main character is trying to bring resurrect a girl and to complete this task he must defeat giant creatures. So the designers created conflict centered around these creatures, creatures that are preventing you from accomplishing your goal. There is no way around this conflict; you must defeat it in order to progress to resurrecting the girl.
The game world is very open from what I have seen; the quickest way to travel around it is on horseback. I have not seen a reward system yet, but I haven’t been able to complete any of the required tasks yet. I haven’t seen any cutscences besides the first scene introducing the storyline.
Needless to say the game has not kept me interested because of the skill level required to play it.
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