I finally got around to playing the demo of Enslaved last night (I was going through a few demos I had downloaded, but not played).

I must admit, I’m amazed that it has been getting the review scores it has. Though Eurogamer did say that it picks up after the start, so maybe Ninja Theory have just put the wrong bit of the game in the demo?

Anyway, this is going to be an ugly bullet point list, so here we go:

• Environments are ugly to me – lots of detail in the textures but not really showing anything, if that makes sense? I can’t remember the word for it off the top of my head, but it’s just a lot of little pointless mechanical details and stuff that serve to just make very visually complicated textures that all blur into noise at a medium distance.
• Lighting was horrible in the interior – bright green & red reminded me of early Unreal 1 levels. Shadowing was too soft even in out of the way bits, gave the scene no depth.
• Character designs were a boringly generic semi-naked muscle man, and semi-naked lithe redhead girl.
• Andy Serkis doing his usual overacting and gurning away. Worked really well for being Gollum, but I wouldn’t say it’s been so successful in anything else I’ve ever seen him in. Still, other people seem to like his idea of acting.
• Platforming was boring. Linear routes that are all highlighted out for you, so there is no sense that you have achieved anything or found your own route.
• Combat was dull button mashing. Again, no sense that I was choosing which cool moves to do, or even really which enemy to attack.
• Gameplay and the “in game” cutscene cameras regularly broke rules about crossing the line which made a lot of the scenes really confusing to me. The combat camera I actually quite liked, as it had the right amount of dynamism that made combat feel punchier. It was too close in though, Batman AA does a better job of pulling back to show the enemies while still being close enough in to make you feel connected.
• One thing in particular that put me off was that the game has really floaty controls – the main character has no weight to him at all. As an example of this stand still and flick the stick left and right. Monkey launches himself into a full on sprint for half a second, then does the same in the other direction, but with no inertia.
• The level design had some very stupid things. Unless I’m confused – the level is meant to be a prison ship of some kind? And the robots you fight are the guards? Because there are doors that are locked until you kill the right number of robots, when they automatically unlock. So if my take on the situation is right, this is a prison that unlocks when you kill enough guards? It just smacks of really uninventive progression blockers.
• Oh and the movie that plays when the demo ends – the firts shot is of someone driving a bike through a landscape of a really horrible repeating texture. Looked like late 90′s FMV.

I will be staying well clear, I think.