Summary

Shadow of the Colossus has a few control issues that are significant. Once you get over the frustration, you'll be treated to a great game that is simple in premise, but rewarding to play. The plot is sparse, but used well, and everything from sound to graphics to music contributes to an environment and scenario that'll stay in your memory. This game is as much a puzzle game as it is an action game, so be prepared to think while you slash about.

Pros

The graphics are awesome for the Playstation 2.

Exploration in the game world is very fun.

The Colossus battles are some of the most theatric and epic in all of video gaming.

No needless extras artificially lengthen the gameplay.

Cons

The camera has a mind of its own.

Wander might to too unwieldy for some.

On the other hand, no extras mean that the game can be completed in its entirety in a few sittings.

By now, Shadow of the Colossus has become a household name, a term I use purely to gauge the critical success of the game. Team Ico takes the inverse Capcom approach to games, making very few of them but making them count; an approach which was employed by Keiji Inafune himself when he tossed dummy franchises at consumers until retro games were cool again and Mega Man 9 could rock my world. What was I talking about? Ah, yes, Shadow of the Colossus.

I admit, I am desperately behind the times outside of my happy Nintendo bubble; desperately, desperately behind the times. As I write this review, I have running in another tab Half-Life 2, making all ridicule of me in light of a certain XKCD strip entirely valid. Thus, upon telling my small circle of friends that I purchased Shadow of the Colossus, I was applauded and told I was in for a good time. The opening certainly is the beginning of the promise. Graphically, the game pushes the Playstation 2 to its limits. This resulted in a negligible drop in frame rate, but unlike the game-breaking lag of running Mass Effect with a low-end graphics card, I found the frame rate to be a part of the experience.

The plot is basic: You take control of a Marth clone named Wander - "Wanda," as some regions took the Japanese too closely - on his quest to resurrect his love interest at the request of an omniscient voice that promises results for a favor. Your quest? You must kill the Colossi mentioned in the title. You've got a magical sword, a bow with limitless arrows, and your trusty horse Agro.

When I first got control of Wander, I immediately re-synched my wireless controller, then tried a wired controller before realizing that veering off a little to the side is how the game is played. As it turns out, the default camera position is directly behind the player character and a little off to the side. You get used to it after a while, but I can't reiterate properly how poorly the game made its case as far as the first impression goes. When you get used to moving like one of your legs is longer than the other, you begin to wrestle with the camera itself. I didn't know that the starting point temple had a series of stairs leading into the main field until I thought I was leaping to my death, or at least a good chunk of my health bar off.

When I made a mention of Shadow of the Colossus in my Prey review, I wasn't just guessing. I had a fourth of the game under my belt and was struck by the need to play something more high-octane and instantly gratifying at that very moment. Tangent come full circle, my point is that the game's atmosphere is as beautiful, serene, haunting large, and immersive (reviewer buzz word) as they say. Tragically, time is not treating this game well when it comes to the newest generation of "gamers" increasingly being unable to judge a game based off the capabilities at the time, but I can and I have. Exploring the terrain in the game world makes you feel isolated, but it doesn't really matter. You're so focused on the task at hand and exploring about that you're having too much fun to feel lonely. At least the horse is a reliable enough mode of transportation. The only gripe I have is that sometimes the game can't tell when I want to jump normally or mount Agro. Other times, I have to get off Agro and "reset" him so he can move fast. These are both negligible.

If you're like me and have a threshold for appreciating ambiance before you need something that more resembles conventional gameplay, you'll hold up your sword and follow the laser pointer reflection of the sun's light to the location of the first Colossus. If you've been living under a rock for the last few generations or are feigning ignorance for the sake of tension like I am now, you might expect something called a Colossus to be twice your size and buffed up or made of rock. Take a situation where you're stuck fighting a big, intimidating monster in an arena setting. Now imagine that the actual Coliseum rose from the Earth and THAT is what you must fight. That's a Colossus. I'm exaggerating a little, but not by much; those things are HUGE. If you don't believe me, take a few moments to Google Image Search "Shadow of the Colossus" and I am sure that you will see what I mean.

From here, the game goes into epic incarnate. The convention in games is that when you're faced with a building-sized opponent, some dues ex machina resolves the situation or helps you be more capable in facing it. In Shadow of the Colossus, the appropriate response of is to shout, "It's game time," pull out your sword, and run at the Colossus's soles. Granted, that's only for the first few Colossi. To be more specific, you will immediately be applying techniques for rolling, wall jumping, and using your weapons in order to take down a Colossus. In one way or another, each Colossus requires you to climb on their hairy back or whatever can be gripped to find a weak spot and stab it relentlessly until the big lug's health bar is fully depleted.

Winning a fight is so simple, yet actually getting to that point is where Shadow of the Colossus makes its mark. You can't just climb up; you have to find a way to make the Colossus bend over or reach for you or extend some part of its body so you can get a grip and a boost up. This effectively makes every Colossus fight a puzzle as well; a frustrating puzzle in which knowing the answer is only half of the conflict. Once you've zeroed in on the target spot on the Colossus, you need to grab on and stay on. A large part of Shadow of the Colossus is holding down the R1 button to stay latched on to the Colossus and hang on for dear life. I had to learn through trial and error that a big pink circle near my health bar represented my "grip;" once the circle shrunk to nothing, Wander was forced to let go. It sounds simple on paper, but when the Colossus tries to shake you off and Wander is flailing about like a persistent sticker, you'll find that letting go and conserving your grip is part of the strategy.

As much as you'll be contending with the Colossi, you will also be contending with the camera. While riding through the poetically barren planes, I found myself holding up my sword or readying my bow just to get the camera to stay in one place and cooperate for just a moment. You can use the right control stick to alter the camera like in any game, but you'll find it is pointless. This game is straight-up type-A with its camera; as soon as you set it, the game will persist, "Nonononono... THIS camera angle is better... trust me." Not only will the game pick your camera angle for you, but it sometimes won't make up its mind, especially when you're trying to pull a maneuver that's camera-dependant.

For instance, reaching the third Colossus requires me to swim to a ramp, run my way up, and then make a big leap that takes up all of Wander's jumping capability. It's simple enough if you're familiar with the limitations of the character, but the camera seems to enjoy being at an angle rather than directly facing the wall. I had to swim back and run up that ramp a few times because of that inopportune camera angle.

The game REALLY stuck it to me when I had to pull off a maneuver in which I held the direction to Wander's back and jump to go from one wall to the opposite one. The camera panned out to show me where the wall is, but wouldn't let me adjust it in order to actually make the jump. Instead I either jumped further up the current wall or dropped off somehow.

As much as I can go on about how this game frustrated me with easily fixable problems and what I thought were poor decisions, the game is actually good; very good. Once you finally accept the camera's supremacy over your right analog stick, you get into the game and really IN to it. The ride to the Colossus is almost therapeutic in how lovingly simple it is. Barring one labyrinthine forest, the landscape is beautiful and non-complicated. The sounds of nature are bountiful and help you relax before it all hits the fan and you find Colossus foot aiming for you.

Each encounter is backed with a smooth, strong soundtrack that compliments the situation perfectly, but after the fact is nearly entirely forgettable. The final boss fight, spectacularly complicated encounter that puts to the test everything you've learned, has the most memorable theme since it's more sorrowful than it is climactic. You'd think it would bore you, but on the contrary. You have to fight the mood in order to get up on that beast and slay it.

Here's a few gameplay spoilers for you: Jumping then holding the crouch and the attack button will make Wander perform a landing stab which is quite powerful. L1 seems useless until you find a Colossus and it turns out the button centers the camera on that Colossus. Anything that keeps the swiveling camera steady at all isn't so bad. In addition, that circle that opens up over your grip gauge is how powerful your stab will be when you press the attack button again. These are all things you have to stumble upon but would lose no love to just have told to you.

As far as difficulty goes, I'd say that Shadow of the Colossus is above the standard fare in keeping you in one place for a while. When a game like this can be beaten in a single sitting by a person who knows what he or she is doing, something has to be done. Almost all of this difficulty is contained within solving the puzzle of how to beat a Colossus. In that regard, the game is only as hard as how long it takes for you to look up the solutions online; and even after you get the instructions you still have to actually DO it. Until you master a Colossus's patterns and get a sense of timing, you'll flail about and fall off more than a few times.

Dying is something to you'll never have to worry about until way, way late in the game; and even if you do, I'm glad to say that Shadow of the Colossus picks its genres correctly by making a minor slap on the wrist. When you die against a Colossus, you're brought back to the cinematic leading up to the fight. Since three-fourths of the difficulty is in figuring out how to hurt the thing, being sent back to the start is about going through the motions. It's quite fun, actually, because every encounter is so unique that you'll want to get the most out of them each time. The circumstances of dying, however, vary.

My philosophy of a good game is, "Maximum capability, maximum challenge." Old school games revolved around characters who could bend physics in completely unrealistic ways, but are hampered down by enemies and bullets so numerous or creative that learning the ins and outs of the gameplay is the only way to see that credits roll. Nowadays our player characters have to emulate real life as close as possible and be just awkward and unintuitive as our real bodies. Don't get me wrong, this sort of mobility has its place in gaming, primarily the survival horror genre; but when you're using a magical sword to climb up on and stab building-sized enemies which look like the Aztec ancestors of the creatures from "Where the Wild Things Are," I think that lengthy animations where they aren't needed for the sake of the gameplay aren't required.

I'm not even indicating Shadow of the Colossus, here. For the most part, said lengthy animations are used to the great effects I used earlier. The big irk that brought this on was when Wander takes a particularly heavy hit, he'll stay on the ground, accepting no player input, for a good few seconds. I can understand where Team Ico gets this from; I'd probably die if I was on the receiving end of many of the things Wander is put through. Flying back after a hit: fine. Staying on the ground for a few seconds to show that Wander is in pain: fine. Staying on the ground for more than a few seconds to show that Wander is really in pain: fine. Staying on the ground for more than more than a few seconds, just long enough to let the Colossus warm up its next attack and knock you back down each and every time you get up, without any chance to defend yourself or dodge, and repeat until you're dead: I'd say the game is tripping over itself.

Often when I fell off or died and was forced to repeat a certain process over and over, I grappled with myself to determine whether this was feeding into the theme of hopelessness and insurmountable odds, or the game was just broken and the developers masochistic. After the fact, I have determined that every bit of frustration and yelling I had from this game fed into the former category. Now that I have the game and experience under my belt, I look back fondly on all that stubbornness which paid off. This one mechanic of a drawn-out instant death, however, just felt like the game was laughing at me and treating me like a piñata.

Now we're down to the essential question: Is Shadow of the Colossus as legendary as they say? In the opinion of this humble reviewer, I say "Mostly." It definitely gets points for being the Punch-Out!! of action/adventure games: Boss fight after boss fight after inventive and epic boss fight. It doesn't try and lengthen its gameplay through dungeons or fetch quests or needless required knickknack collection. The entire world is open to you and its up to you whether you want to find the next Colossus and get one-sixteenth closer to the game's ending, or charge off in a random direction, eyes glistening, wandering, "Ooh, what's over there?" That's my friends, is the mark of a good game with "adventure" anywhere in the genre.

I must warn you, though, that if you plan on playing Shadow of the Colossus, do it sooner rather than later. Everything that makes the game great - immersion, simple but effectively presented story, thematic music, seamless connection between plot and gameplay, cinematic boss fights, and anything else - is being increasingly offered by other video games and movies and the like in watered-down, consumer-friendly portions, making Shadow of the Colossus appear superfluous to newer generations. This warning hardly represents my attitude toward Shadow of the Colossus; despite the control flaws, it was an awesome game to experience. However, when standards fall so low that the fifth of twelve identical sewer stages in Gears of War 5 tops every vlogger's top ten list of immersive environments of all time, or when having music in a video game requires DLC, just remember that I recommended an industry-challenging game to you all. That is, I did so before internet access cost an additional dime for every link you click.

Imagine Half-Life, but with a sense of pacing; that is Prey. Just like Square Enix and Final Fantasy VII to RPGs, Valve influence is abundant in First Person Shooters following Half-Life. I've even grown paranoid and see Valve everywhere there's a remote connection; regardless, I will try to tone it down and judge Prey on its own merits. The politics surrounding who came up with what first are confusing, so I won't play favorites or engage in the he-said-she-said of copyright. This is all about Prey.

Ahem, Prey is a game I received with my Xbox 360 along with Perfect Dark Zero and Project Gotham Racing. The former is seen as a soulless rehash minus the innovation and the latter, well, I never hear about it in my neck of the woods. In other words, I didn't have too high of prospects for Prey given the company it keeps. It doesn't help that Steam has shown me the light of FPSs on the PC.

Prey is a first-person affair through and though. The Gordon Freeman this time around is Cherokee man Domasi Tawodi, or "Tommy," a bitter individual with a very realistic and modern vocabuly; he swears a lot. The game starts with Tommy in a run-down bar/casino in an Indian reservation, aspiring to be something greater than what life has given him. He is accompanied by his grandfather, a rather token old Native American whose well-founded belief in the spirits of the Earth has no effect on Tommy, and his love interest Jen. The bar is a carefully crafted environment with plenty of doors and toilet seats to interact with; when Tommy approaches something he can touch, his hand rises up and you press the right trigger to enact INTENSE POKING ACTION! Seriously, that's what happens. Tommy pokes the touch screen and something happens.

My gamer instincts told me that the plot was over by Jen, but I was too amused with the jukebox and video gambling machines. I actually managed to score three achievements in the first scene of the game by playing poker, black jack, and a charming little Pac-Man clone called Runeman. With my achievements pocketed and actual music scrolled through, I had to leave behind this little slice of interactive and immersive environment in favor of the plot.

A few rowdy guys harass Jen and Tommy proves what a tough guy he is by getting into a bar fight using a wrench. Jen reprimands Tommy for his violent behavior, then bam: Aliens. That's right; aliens tear off the roof and abduct them all set to the background music of "Don't Fear the Reaper" from the jukebox. Of course, this premise is on the back of the box, but I can only imagine the response of a player who has never heard of Prey and was just sit in front of the game and told to play. When I described the plot to another person as such in the same manner I said right now, he made a double take. I love it.

Yes, folks; Prey is an alien abduction game that can go anywhere. It borrows from every Roswell myth and stereotype and makes an absolute worst-case scenario out of it. The next scene opens Tommy's eyes as he's strapped to a table and sent on a conveyor belt to wherever. The view from there takes us through a tour of nightmarish lab filled with soldier-like humanoids dragging people along to unknown but assuredly horrible fates. A freak accident derails Tommy and hands the tour over to the player. Wandering the fleshy halls of the alien ship has that "Don't go in there" vibe that Resident Evil started and Silent Hill perfected. It's not exactly as effective as either of them seeing as how you have a wrench between you and the horrible unknown - and not too far in, a gun, as well - but you've got plenty of shock images and time-tested devices to keep you in the game.

Being a mid 2000s FPS, the walls are nice and dark and given a slimy sheen for your displeasure. The alien designs borrow from the contemporary sci-fi "that's messed up" mindset. Much like Valve has done, the soundtrack is mostly kept to atmospheric sound effects and cavernous wind instruments. It really is hard to judge such technical things when they borrow from known science fiction; I'll just say from now on that originality doesn't lie in the concept, but what is done with it.

Whereas games like Metroid make you feel independent and Shadow of the Colossus combines independence with isolation, the start of Prey focuses on the isolation aspect. Jen is being shuttled around and dangled in front of you like a carrot while all the humans not strapped to tables or being gutted are inconsolably driven mad. Every so often, you'll come across a monitor that picks up a radio show being broadcast on Earth, hosted by the actual Art Bell. It's surreal to hear such a dismissive discussion going on while you're living the truth of it. Whenever the show cut off, I was left with a melancholy feeling. The final kick to the dog comes when the grandfather is sacrificed to a particularly heart-wrenching death scene. The game wants to make sure that you see this in all its obscurely messy glory, much to the chagrin of speed runners. In fact, the no-cutscene approach used in Valve games is completely intact here. That means no skipping scenes; fine for the first time around, bothersome during replays.

During your wandering, where there's health spores and ammo everywhere, the game herds you onto a catwalk to which Tommy quips, "Well, that looks safe." The rickety thing breaks its hinges and plummets you to your death. As it turns out, death isn't so bad when you're a Cherokee; Tommy is sucked into a vortex to a tribal valley area where grandfather Enisi appears to him as a spirit. Tommy is given special powers that allow him to project his immortal soul out of his body to go where he can't. In addition, dying, instead of forcing you to return to your last save, pits you on an ethereal floating platform where you have to shoot red and blue manta rays to fix yourself up until time runs out and you fall back down to your mortal body. This never gets harder to do or less effective over time; you can keep dying and playing this mini game as many times as you want from that point forward.

It is at this point you begin to realize that Prey is a Tsundere game. It may look mean-spirited with its premise and atmosphere, but behind that is a happy game that loves you very much. Prey wants you to succeed and will hold your hand or pick you up whenever you fall down and greet you with a hug and a kiss after a hard day of work and tell you to sit down and put up your feet on the couch where there's a cold drink on the table next to you. There are health spores and stations everywhere, but I sometimes questioned the relevance when dying can bring you back with full health depending on how good you are. Ammo rains down everywhere, but the weapons work so well that I left a lot of it behind. Heck, I used the Cherokee bow as often as the ammo-needing weapons. The enemy AI is so thick that even I looked pro. It is a scientific fact that I am not good at shooter games; I'm pretty sure it's on file in a university in France somewhere. Furthermore, this is the 360 version. My skill plus dual analog does not equal pro. When I feel good about my skills in a shooter on an Xbox 360 game, I get suspicious.

Despite the last paragraph sounding like a verbal beat-down of Prey, my actual opinion couldn't be further from the tone. I had a disproportionate amount of fun playing this game with reckless abandon. The severity and survival instincts started giving way to getting to point B. From this point on, the game begins emphasizing puzzle-solving above prowess in battle. Projecting Tommy's spirit allows him to go past force fields to deactivate it on the other side or activate a lift or start a machine in two places at nearly the same time. I really enjoyed this gameplay mechanic and saw it going places. I used it for reconnaissance and clearing the path ahead as well as intended puzzle solving.

The issue with this is that I could have seen this mechanic going places, but never really did. Whenever I saw a force field, I knew immediately, "Time for the Spirit Walk!" Prey even has you covered if you don't get it immediately; sun markings are somehow carved into the walls, floors, and ceilings. M-plus-one is present, but doesn't go so far. I suppose this is another effort to keep things moving rather than keep you in one place for a long time.

Speaking of which, I was stuck twice in times when intuition was actually needed. There are spots on the walls which when you shoot them, the gravity is changed so that the same surface becomes the floor. It's used to great effect, but oh boy is it required that you have to stumble upon it. I was stuck in a single room for twenty minutes before I noticed my crosshairs turned red over those symbols. The last few innovations are an anti-gravity floor that you stick to, even when on the walls and ceiling, and portals before Portal was released. Each and every innovation in this game is used separately and in some combination. Solving these puzzles was great fun, one of the reasons being I was hardly hung up.

As you progress, you leave the meat grinder and start exploring the rest of the ship where plot escalates and inevitably Tommy's great destiny is revealed. You'd imagine that alien abduction and Native American supernatural spirituality would stay in separate stories, but Prey has that balance with the modern and colorfully verbal Tommy between. In almost no time you're touting heavy weaponry, mowing down small waves of enemies, and piloting small ships in a setting that's more standard for the science fiction genre. You really must wonder how the game came from a horror thriller ride to this.

I say "this" not in a dismissive tone, because the rest of the game picks up in spectacular gameplay where the plot and immersion have taken a backseat. The gun selection is good, varied, and all relevant. You have your assault rifle-slash-sniper rifle, a similar weapon which also lobs grenades, other standard impact weapons, the crow bar- ahem, wrench, and my favorite, the Leech Gun. Rather than ammo, the Leech Gun is refilled at Leech stations via its secondary function. It changes depending on what kind of energy you put into it. It is a versatile weapon that I really very much enjoyed loading up and letting the enemies had it. A new leech station was a new lease on the life of the fun factor.

Oh, right, and the vehicle riding segments. The game loved putting you into a ship every so often after the halfway point. It was fun, except the cardinal rule of no-penalty respawn was waived. If the vehicle booms, you get sent back to where you originally picked it up, which can be far back. Perhaps Prey spoiled me so much that this felt relevant. Other than that, the vehicle is one of the smoothest riding experiences I've had in an FPS and flies around almost like you have noClip on; it's fun. Using a tractor beam to hold enemies in place while I blast them to chunks: even more so.

By the time I was past all the mildly intriguing and increasingly mind-screwy plot to the underwhelming final boss right, I really got the feeling that this game was made to be played through and display itself openly. The ease of play kept me entertained and happy all the way through and if I may make an admission, Tommy's choice of words in his monologues matches what the player might think at the time. He says such gems as "Oh, that can't be good," and "That was fucked up," followed shortly by, "No... THAT'S fucked up." This was my cue to say, "No... THAT'S fucked up" every time something new came along.

Whether you will enjoy this game or see it as a disgrace is up to you. I enjoyed the game for what I saw it to be. I figured that my skills would be dull due to the lack of urgency, but I found that I slowly got better at the game and became a dual analog sharpshooter, forged in the fires of bravado. Although the enemy AI is thick, never dying and being forced into the Death Walk mini game is stilly mighty tricky.

I never thought about it during the fact, but Prey could have been Nintendo hard considering how much damage Tommy takes and how aggressive the enemies tend to be at times. If you really want your vicious difficulty, simply reload your last save instead of completing a Death Walk. The choice is even more empowering because you're playing your own way. If that isn't enough for you or you want something more challenging WITH Death Walk, the game provides Cherokee difficulty - more affectionately referred to as "More like it;" now Tommy takes even MORE damage and those bothersome health spores are removed. It's worth it alone just to replay the first chapters of the game before you get Death Walk and get a glimpse of what could have been.

Prey is a wading pool of First Person Shooter innovation. The plot and concepts are original and well pulled off. I guess with the setting beside Western tastes and with Halo and Half-Life taking up both sides of the FPS spectrum, this happy medium was skipped over. I dare say that Prey could become a force to be reckoned with if the series got picked up, polished, and built upon.