Fun and innovative, but fun diminished by poor voice acting and highly suspect hit boxes.

User Rating: 4.5 | Zeno Clash PC
Zeno Clash is a very interesting game from several standpoints, most notably it's very exotic characters/locales and fighting system. However, I feel this game falls to the ground in several regards - that have actually made me feel that this game wasn't worth the $20.00 I paid for it.

My reasons?

1) Terrible, terrible voice acting.

2) Exotic characters are interesting: but not when the models are so crappy! This is on the Source engine, I know, but why is it that these models look like they predate HL2?

3) Hit boxes highly suspect. It is not uncommon to watch a lone enemy swing at you from several meters away and mysteriously connect with you. It is also, conversely, not uncommon to nail an unblocking opponent who simply *ignores* your attack.

4) Do you like being caught on scenery in the middle of combat? I don't.

5) The "hunter" boss can be killed with the pistols VERY VERY easily. All you need to do is just keep shooting him, and listening to him go "Ahh-Ahh-Ahh-Ahh" as the sound clips over itself. He will die without ever having the chance to do anything.

6) TINY TINY TINY environments! You had the source engine to play with, but this is it?

7) Some of the parts of the game are just shooting fish in a barrel. "Oh, here come those lizard things. I'll just stand entirely still and lazily shoot them until I can finally go to the next, hopefully more interesting, section of the game.

8) Your friend, Daedra... umm... loses her horns after the first scene. They just vanish, never to return. Umm... modelers?

9) During a few cutscenses, when other people speak to your character, they are often not shown on the screen at all, though your character chats away with them. The first thing I often do after the cutscene ends is look around: who the heck was I talking to?

10) In the very first part of the game try tossing a guy over the edge, but allow him to get caught on the net. There, you've totally screwed up the game. You'll have to restart. He'll be on that near-invisible badly UV-mapped "net" forever. Game stalemate. I accomplished this in my first two minutes of playing! Two minutes of playing a game, and I've broken it????

11) Constant barrages of things said and done that have nothing to do with anything and are never again explained.


Don't get me wrong, this is a very interesting game.. but it has a lot of bugs, seems to have just been thrown together with the developers saying "Whatever" to plot, world, gameplay dynamics, environments, characters, models and bug testing. I would be happy right now if I only paid $5.00 for this game, but I didn't: I paid $20, which was far too much.