At a glance...

El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron review

Before I started playing El Shaddai: Ascention of the Metatron, it had already made some strong impressions. On the positive side, I am always attracted to games with beautiful concept and box art, and this one certainly scores very highly in that respect. On the other hand, alarm bells start ringing when the name of a game's director is mentioned in the feature summary on the box; worse still when he's described as "visionary". El Shaddai kicks the alarm system into overdrive by promising "an intense audiovisual trip into the mind" of this visionary chap.

Before you start playing, you are asked to select a difficulty: "Easy" if you "just want to enjoy the story" or "Normal" if you want the battles to be a challenge (harder difficulties become selectable after the first play-through). Selecting Normal, I was launched straight into a fight, facing off against some kind of pyramid-headed angel with one eye. Unaware of the controls (and I think I was *meant* to lose the fight anyway), I promptly had all my armour blown off, and was then asked to hammer buttons randomly to revive myself, which resulted in me being returned to the title screen. The game restarted, but the relatively normal armour I had been wearing before the fallen angel trashed it was replaced by some more extravagant JRPG armour made of a mysterious white material, and with enough holes in it to render it useless against any weapon. On the plus side, rather than being asked to fight with my fists like last time, I was given a cool glowing laser-sword.

El Shaddai boasts that it blends 3D and 2D sections together seamlessly. We start in 3D, which basically involves running down a linear corridor, fighting the odd amorphous blob-monster (classic early-game lazy enemy design in my opinion). Early on, combat is just a case of tapping one button, with the unpleasant twist that every now and then your weapon becomes “tainted” by the evil beings you are fighting, and needs to be “cleansed” (all it takes is one button press, but this leaves you open to attacks while the animation plays). Once the cleanse button also starts being used to disarm enemies, combat gets a little cooler, though you soon get bored of the overly-long disarm animation that plays every time.

Enemies get gradually more distinctive, but are never exactly breathtaking designs: they come equipped with different weapons, which you can steal by disarming them. Since each weapon is pretty limited in its scope for combos and techniques, swapping regularly at least keeps the game interesting. However, you soon spot the pattern: run down a linear corridor (feeling obligated to smash every fragile looking object to collect billions of little red orbs that “power you up” somehow) until you reach a circular platform, at which point you must defeat enemies to progress. The battles become longer as the game goes on, but each new enemy design is reused so many times that you’ll soon be sick of seeing the same baddies on every plateau.

The 2D sections are a straightforward platforming affair. There is the odd very easy “puzzle”, and a few enemies to slash at. If you fall off in the platform stages, or get beaten up in the 3D fights, your armour starts to break, and can be repaired by picking up blue hearts from destructible scenery. As at the beginning of the game, when you get knocked out, you must mash buttons randomly to revive: each time you do this, the window of time in which to mash a sufficient number of buttons is diminished. Personally, I found this mechanic very frustrating, as when I die I like to spend time complaining that it was unfair, perhaps even throwing the controller down in frustration; however, on the one occasion I did that, I soon realised my failure to button-mash had resulted in a game-over. This has little real consequence, except that you need to wait for a longer loading time to restart from where you died.

The fallen angel fights from the beginning of the game crop up frequently as you progress, and later on you figure out how to defeat each of them (in another incredible piece of character design, they all look basically the same except they glow different colours and some are a bit chubby). Win or lose, you continue on with the game: I never really worked out what impact these battles had on anything, but maybe that requires multiple play-throughs to discover... Given the thoroughly linear nature of the majority of the game though, I doubt it matters much.

I should probably say some positive things at this point (as I feel I’m being maybe a bit un-balanced!). El Shaddai certainly makes a strong point for video games as art: a cause that I firmly support. It makes a lot of effort to be visually distinctive and arty, which is commendable. Also, as you fight some of the enemies, their armour falls off, and they eventually die when they are reduced down to their g-string: this, needless to say, is hilarious. There is a motorcycle-driving section in a futuristic cityscape, which is very fun: despite being totally different from the rest of the game, it doesn’t feel out of place, and in fact is a welcome change of pace from all the wandering along linear corridors in constant fear of the next dreaded circular platform and its frighteningly dull enemies.

Being positive really didn’t last long, did it? Maybe my expectations were too high when I started playing it, but the gameplay is very similar to things like Bayonetta and Devil May Cry, and the stylised graphics soon just become annoying. Whilst some of the visual elements are quirky and well designed (trees with leaves that flow into the sky, corrupted Nephilim with elongated arms, drooping heads and halo-like ridges sprouting from their shoulders), a lot of it seems derivative. It started out in what looked like the snow-scape from early in Final Fantasy XIII, and later on I arrived in the floating city from the same game; a platforming section with a blatant nod to classic Nintendo titles also soon outstayed its welcome. The levels are too long, and the same content is repeated shamelessly; the boss battles are also needlessly long - after you’ve figured out all the mechanics, you still need to work your way through five to ten repetitions of the same lengthy sequence. Even then, it’s often difficult to tell whether you’re doing the right thing, as bosses take a long time to show any sign of taking damage. Whilst you do this, they will repeatedly utter the same handful of annoying phrases, perhaps in an attempt to mentally whittle you down.

I’ve been very harsh about El Shaddai, but this is because I feel I need to justify why I think it is so much less amazing than other people seem to believe. It’s not an awful game, but neither is it ground-breakingly original or fun to play in long sessions, mainly due to a lack of variation in the early chapters. Other games have done the same mechanics better, and often when something new is introduced you think “oh yeah, like in that other game”. There are certainly some cool visual touches, and the ability to swap weapons by disarming your enemies is a nice touch (though any kind of targeting system would be appreciated especially with the ranged weapon).

The final couple of chapters actually get very strong: platforming becomes more sophisticated, there are a lot of epic visuals (Ezekiel and Ishtar fighting as giant shadows on the back wall whilst you platform away in the foreground is stunning). And the final boss ends the game on a high, with some great fun mechanics. It’s a shame there was so much padding earlier in the game though, because by the time I got to the really good stuff I was already bored.

Ratings

Click here to buy El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron from Amazon.co.uk.

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