“Zeno Clash: Ultimate Edition” may just be the best game featuring a bird-legged, hermaphroditic creature ever made. Then again, it is also the only game featuring a bird-legged, hermaphroditic creature ever made.
And strangely enough, that is meant as a compliment.
Originally appearing last year on the PC, the curious and quirky “Zeno Clash” was pretty interesting. It combines the groundbreaking first-person melee fighting of “Dark Messiah of Might and Magic” with the unusual organic weapons from “Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath,” wrapping them all up in a nice, inscrutable package.
The land where “Zeno Clash” takes place, Zenozoik, is an enigmatic place full of fantastic creatures, hidden secrets and ancient mysteries. The game plays out “Memento” style, starting with the assassination of the aforementioned bird-legged, hermaphroditic creature Father-Mother by one of its sons, Ghat.
Surrounded by legions of his confused and angry brothers and sisters, Ghat must fight his way out of the city of Halstedom by any means necessary.
His journey to escape will take him far across Zenozoik, where Father-Mother’s secrets are not the only mysteries to be unveiled. He will have to fight his own family, a clan of insane navel-gazers and some deadly apparitions in order to be vindicated.
While there are weapons that Ghat can use to take on his foes, their control is still a little slippery. Luckily, weapons come sporadically and often break, forcing Ghat to go mano-a-mano with his opponents.
The first person melee is still top-notch, as fresh today as it was a year ago. Unfortunately, it is also still a tad sloppy, being extremely hard to fight off two or more opponents, particularly when a third is sniping from afar with a set of dual fish guns.
This might make the game more “real”— after all, it is pretty hard to fight off multiple people in real life— but this is a game, and a rather fantastical one at that. The ability to block oncoming side attacks when guarding would have been nice.
“Zeno Clash: Ultimate Edition” is the same game as the PC version, albeit for Xbox Live and including combat rebalancing, new modes and new gameplay content. Cooperative play is exclusive to the “Ultimate Edition,” allowing the player and a friend to fight wave after wave of fighters in the Tower Challenge both online and locally via split screen.
While the story is interesting, it can easily be completed in less than five hours, and after a while, the combat does become a tad repetitive.
The bulk of the content lies in the single player survival challenges, which, while fun enough, eventually fall prey to the same repetitiveness of the main campaign’s brawls.
That is not to say everything is bad. Despite its shortcomings, “Zeno Clash: Ultimate Edition” is still a fantastic game, and well worth the money to spend an evening or afternoon exploring Ghat’s story.
For those who played “Zeno Clash” on the PC last year, there is nothing here that warrants a purchase. For people new to Zeno Clash though, the Ultimate Edition is a great chance to get in on the oddness at a great price.
“Zeno Clash: Ultimate Edition” was developed by ACE Team and published by Atlus for the Xbox 360 on May 5. It is available in the Xbox Live Marketplace for 1,200 Microsoft Points, or $15. The Publisher gave a copy of the game to The Current for reviewing purposes.
