Review: Enslaved: Odyssey to the West Premium Edition

Back when it first released in 2010, Enslaved: Odyssey to the West was firmly lodged in my 360’s disc drive for a good week. A reimagining of the classic 16^th Century Chinese novel “Journey to the West”, Enslaved tells the story of Tripitaka (or Trip), a young girl trying to get back home after being kidnapped. Trip has (unwilling) help in the form of Monkey, another prisoner aboard the ship she escaped. Now the game returns in 2013 with the Enslaved: Premium Edition, a remastered version for the PC and PS3.

Set 150 years in the future after a global war has destroyed modern civilisation, the game sees you making your way west across the former United States to Trip’s home. Using the two characters in tandem, you will climb, clamber and puzzle your way through a wide variety of environs, from overgrown cities to junkyards and everything in between. The parkour-style sections are very fluid, and although they are quite linear they still are a lot of fun. Monkey’s animation’s work well here and given his surprising agility move along at a good pace as well.

Interspersed with the puzzles and parkour are the game’s combat sections, where Monkey battles the mech oppressors who captured  you in the first place with Trip’s assistance. The combat is your typical block-parry-strike arrangement, with the option to call in assists from Trip such as a stunning move to hold enemies in stasis while you wail on them. One of my favourite parts of the original combat looks as good as ever here – the finishing move for each combat encounter ends with a close-up on Monkey taking down the enemy accompanied by dramatic lighting, which really helps give you that ‘hero moment’ each time.

Graphically, the game looks a bit clunky when you first start it up, with restricted frame-rates and weird pauses between cutscenes. Once, it even locked itself into a low resolution, despite my suggestions to the contrary. Game options are pretty limited, which is always a pain on games that have been ported from consoles. It was only after discovering a guide on the Steam forums on how to tweak the game’s config files that I was truly able to unlock the game’s true potential. Once you free it from its odd framerate and resolution lockdowns (and remove motion blur if your machine has a bit of grunt), the game looks amazing.

Even on 360, the original game’s graphics were a sight to see, and here the textures for the primary character models have been increased exponentially to give them more detail. This can cause a bit of a clash when some background textures are still at the lower resolution of the game’s original version, but overall does more good than harm. We weren’t able to get a look at the PS3 version of the game, so hopefully our graphics issues were PC-only.

Given the game’s Premium Edition status, it also includes the “Pigsy’s Perfect 10” DLC as standard, helping to round the game out.

Whilst it isn’t a perfect port and upgrade, Enslaved still has a lot to offer to both new and old players alike. The fact this game slipped somewhat under the radar on initial release is a real disappointment, so hopefully this revamp for the PC market will garner some more attention for what is an underappreciated title from Ninja Theory.