A one of a kind experience that could've been a lot better.

User Rating: 7 | Zeno Clash PC
System Setup
This is the setup I used to play the game: Intel Q9550, 4GB RAM, ATi Radeon 4870 1GB, Windows XP SP3. All the components where left at its default clock speeds to avoid any game engine issues due to over clocked hardware.

Now the purpose of this section is not to brag, not at all, but to let the reader know that the game experience wasn't hindered in any way due to low frame rate or choppiness of any kind. With that said, let's start the review!

Story
The game starts with an in-game cinematic of the main character, Ghat, escaping from his hometown after killing father-mother, but before leaving he must fight some of his "brothers" (they're not blood brothers). Fortunately, Ghat is not alone; he's being helped by Deadra, a female team mate that will assist Ghat throughout the game.

After defeating his brothers they finally escape and head to safety… or so they think.

Now, the storytelling from this point becomes rather confusing because while you are escaping, Ghat starts telling Deadra about the events prior to killing father-mother. From this point and on you'll be jumping back and forth between the past and present events.

Each chapter (there are 18) reveals a part of the story through an in-game cinematic, but most of the info in those cinematics is too shallow or pointless, for example: "Armenia peed on herself and starved to death anonymously". Same thing applies to the dialog between characters.

The past/present approach forces you to fight against the same enemies more than once, meaning that you don't actually defeat them but rather knock them out for a while, but if your health reaches zero then you are dead and it is game over.

Overall the story is shallow, uninteresting, the character development is non-existent and the twist at the end is not that rewarding.

Gameplay

Zeno Clash has a very basic control scheme: WASD for movement, E for use, R for reload, SPACEBAR for blocking, MOUSE1 for light attack or shot, MOUSE2 for a strong attack (must hold it in order to charge it) or aiming down the sight, SHIFT for running and in my setup MOUSE4 to lock onto enemies.

The main focus of this game is melee combat in a first person perspective; weapons are secondary but at some points are required in order to beat very specific enemies, like bosses.

As you progress you'll be trained and new fighting techniques will be learn, so you can do counters, attack from the side, ram into your enemies and break their defenses, or evade your enemies easier.

Now, the way the game balances attack/defense is by using a stamina bar, which will deplete depending if you are blocking or charging your enemy with an attack. Once the stamina bar reaches zero your attacks become less effective and your defense drops. The good thing about it, is that the recovery time is not long, meaning that you can be back on the fight in no time.

When facing multiple enemies you can use the lock key to help you focus on one particular enemy, the downside of this is that your field of view will decrease and you won't be able to be fully aware of your surroundings unless you unlock, which can be quite troublesome if the enemies are too close together because the lock system will jump between enemies before release and you can get unnecessary damage this way.

In order to recover energy you can consume fruit that is scattered around during or after the battle.

As I said before, weapons are secondary, carry very little ammo per clip (unlimited clips) and since reloading takes too much time and slows you down greatly then you become defenseless so your enemies can attack you easily making you drop whatever weapon you are currently holding if the attack is slightly strong, thus it's not a good idea to use them too often, unless is absolutely required. One more thing, you can melee with you weapon but it's not that effective.

Other than that, defeating an enemy is rewarding most of the time and fighting multiples enemies at once is not too difficult at all, except when the game fails to register a hit.

A.I.

It's not that good, a few times while playing the game; the enemies started fighting against each other "thinking" that they were fighting me. Also there were times that enemies completely ignored me even when I was hitting them, they just simply stood there waiting to be knocked out.

Fighting multiple enemies is quite easy since they won't try to flank you but rather go straight at you, so you can use this and create choke points to defeat them easily.

Deadra, your team mate, can be a PITA sometimes getting in your way or blocking your movements.

Sound

Ambient sounds are ok for the most part, dialogs voices are shallow and boring and father-mother's voice is simply awful since it's made by 2 voices samples (one on top of the other) with some weird effects applied to it.

Also there are some Source sounds barely tweaked that were used, like the explosion sound and the rifle sound, so that makes the game feel more like a mod when you hear those very specific sounds.


Graphics

This is very difficult to judge because there's no real life point of comparison but the overall look of the game is pretty unique and I'd say that everything fits just right for the most part (with some minor exceptions – brushes out of place or too simplistic like a cube with a low-res texture), nothing too bright or too dark, nor too de/saturated.

There's only one thing that I really didn't like, and that was the look of Golem (a character that you meet at about 70% in the game), his textures looked rushed to me and his overall look was too "washed out", and taking into account that he becomes a part of your group until the end of the game, well...

Since the game uses the OB engine, you can expect full AA/AF support and every single screen resolution -including proper widescreen- supported.

You can check some screenshots that I took here
http://www.gamespot.com/pages/forums/show_msgs.php?topic_id=26452629&msg_id=315118837#315118837.

Miscellaneous.

Deadra, feels and move like Alyx Vance, in fact she helps you the same way Alyx does with Gordon Freeman. This is a con, for the same reason stated above (sound); the game feels like a mod rather than something on its own.

The DRM protection this game uses is STEAM, just so you know.

It has 22 achievements, if you like that, I personally don't.

Too short! The game offers about 3 and a half hour of gameplay including cinematics.

Extremely linear! Meaning no exploration whatsoever and don't even think about exploring a bit because the moment you get too far from the main path then the fog damages you or desert worms hit you or you find an invisible wall.

Final Thoughts

To me, one of the benefits of an indie developer is that you are not constrained to anything, you can create whatever you want the way you want it, and being able to create the game experience that you always wanted, and that was what ACE Team did. The downside of this project called Zeno Clash was that such a weird and unique world was too a short, linear and remained unexplored during the whole experience, and taking into account that they were using a very robust game engine then the end result was not that good.

Now, if you are looking for something different of what you normally play then this might be a good buy. Just remember that there's a demo available for you to try it out.


Thanks for reading!