An epic, highly addicting, very frustrating title.
You start the fame with very little information. Your friend has been sacrificed and you arrive in a shrine with your dead friend, obviously about to try some ancient ritual to revive your friend. A voice from the sky will revive if you perform one task. Destroy all 16 colossus.
So each colossus is very different from each other. They all have a trick to climbing on them and finding their "vitals". So you cant just hack at these behemoths, you have to find a special spot, which is different from other colossi, that will allow you to lower their hp. Some have multiple spots, many have one on their head, others on their hand, etc.
You have to grab on and stab each colossus. Its not as easy as it sounds. First off, you have a grab meter. This meter depletes for every action that you do. If it runs out, the colossus will either send you flying or you will fall off. Making you have to climb back on top of the colossus. Finally after bringing down this beast, onward to the next, so on and so forth.
The colossus are hidden and often require some platforming and puzzle solving to find them. You do have a light that guides you somewhat, so not too hard.
The graphics in this HD recreation are very good. Definetley not PS3 quality, but a huge step above PS2. The scenery is breath taking, and the colossus look amazing. Some odd clipping into the environment is present but acceptable. Water effects look amazing.
The storytelling is good, what little there is. You can tell that the developer has much more tp say about the story, but probably keeps it a secret it fits well with Ico. For those unaware, Ico is made bu the team as this game, and both stories exist in the world. Beings Ico is also on this disc, look forward to a review sometime in the near future.
What makes or breaks a game is lastly the controls. This is where i had to ding points. Put simply, the controls are terrible. They do not break the game, but almost. The layout is great, but then why do I want to throw my controller every time i play this wonderful game. For starters, when you are being chased by a colossus and tension is high, it sucks so bad that you cannot mount your horse. You try to, but you keep jumping over the horse, behind the horse and even through the horse, but he wont climb onto it. Finally as the colossus is on top of you, he finally gets on, and then is thrown off by the colossus. Or jumping and holding onto a ledge, then for some reason falling off with a near full grip meter. The biggest annoyance is getting ready for the final stab, the colossus shakes to avoid, which is fine, only to lose your footing and waste the remainder of your grab meter trying to get your footing and falling off. Then you have to repeat everything you did to get back on. When this happens say, 10 times in one fight, it gets a little annoying. My last gripe is there is a spot where you have to jump off a ramp onto a ledge. If you miss you have to try again. To get to the ramp you have to swim like a mile to try again, only problem is he is the slowest swimmer ever. One or twice making this jump, falling, and repeating is fine, but it took me like 20 attempts. Hugely frustrating.
All in all this is a fun, very epic feeling, beautiful game. I logged in about 11 hours into the story mode. Next is time attack mode. If you missed this before, buy this game. If you already own it and want some better visuals, buy this game.