--- Reviews ---

Shadow of the Colossus


I’ve been watching this game for a long time. The reason for that is because it’s from the same team that made Ico, which I loved. I was hoping for a sequel to Ico, but once I saw the premise of Shadow of the Colossus, I changed my mind.  This was obviously an even more ambitious and original game than Ico was.

Now that we've got our hands on it, it could've used a somewhat larger touch of Ico in it. The little bit of platforming you do during the course of the game made me wish for more of it, with a few Ico-type puzzles thrown in as well - but fittingly.

For instance: to find each Colossus, you follow a reflected beam of light from your sword - a very cool game mechanic, like so:

When you find the Colossi, most of them are sitting statue-still, and they stir and get up to fight you when you arrive.  Before you reach them, they look like big piles of rocks, or buildings:

We thought it would be a nice touch if you had to use the reflected beam of light from your sword to wake each Colossus. That would provide the opportunity for some puzzles, as maybe you’d have to make your way to a lit place, or manipulate the game world in some way to accomplish that.

For example, one Colossus is found in a lake above a waterfall, and like the others, he comes out to fight you as soon as you arrive. At first, we thought the lake was behind a dam. If it were, it would be a simple game mechanic to make you release some of the locks on the dam in order to lower the water level and expose the Colossus in the lake, so you could wake him. Things like that.

Stuff We Like:

The most impressive thing about Shadow of the Colossus is undoubtedly the sheer ambition of its premise: a David and Goliath scenario, magnified, that’s immediately gripping. Bosses this big, this mobile, and this up-close-and-personal have really not been done before. It’s a real attention grabber, and it’s the basic foundation and bulk of the game - boss fights and little else. 

The story is threadbare, but still compelling. You’ll keep playing not only because you’re having fun, but because you will want to know what happens at the end.

The artistic vision and scope of this game are also impressive. The Colossi resemble giant living statues, built mostly of stone, and they look and move extremely well. Even up close, they look very detailed, which is impressive: often, large 3D models are just small models blown up. Not so here. The Colossi are carefully sculpted and designed around the gameplay involved in defeating them. The world looks great, too: breathtaking architecture, beautiful landscapes, excellent water in the lakes and rivers.

The game world is huge, and streams with no load times - a remarkable feat considering the scale and beauty of the game (although there is plenty of pop-in geometry and texturing). The framerate is sometimes low, but never unplayable. The graphics are a bit shimmery, but again, that’s a small concern in the face of what the team has accomplished. The accompanying sounds are appropriate, and the music is dramatic and interactive. At least, it varies in volume during a fight based on your proximity to your opponent, a nice touch.

Stuff We Hate:

We're not sure this should quite fall under "hate", but the control of the main character while doing the occasionally required platforming around the game world, and on the Colossi themselves, is a little bit clunky and unresponsive. It’s just a little, but enough to make you think about what you’re doing with the controller rather than settling into an intuitive "forgot I was holding a controller" type of mindset. It’s a minor gripe, but worth mentioning.

A much bigger problem is the game’s bad camera. The camera seems to prefer a low angle, and you can manually adjust it, but you can’t make it stay. The moment you let off of the right analog stick, any height adjustment or rotation you’ve done is undone, and the camera is right back where it started. It also does a very poor job of keeping the main character centered on screen (or on screen at all, sometimes). And oftentimes, the camera is zoomed in too close to see what’s going on very well. This is especially true when using the lock-on function during the boss fights. When locked on, you’re never able to see much of your character, much less the ground around him to tell where you’re going. That makes it difficult to keep from running into things while facing a Colossus, or to guide the Colossus to a particular area.  You get used to it, but sometimes controlling the camera was the hardest part about defeating the current boss.

Which leads us to our third major complaint against the game - the wasted potential and absurdity of (some of) the boss fights. The bosses are big and statue-like, and therefore appropriately slow and imprecise in their movements - fair enough. You’ll have little trouble running circles around most of them, even while fighting the camera. That’s a fair gameplay advantage, when your objective is, for example, to jump onto the boss, climb up to his head, and stick a sword into it.
But we found ourselves asking - as many players undoubtedly will - why this giant human-shaped statue didn’t try to squash our hero while he was climbing up his shoulder, especially once he poked a sword into it. Why didn’t he try to brush this guy off of his head, the way you might if a bug landed in your hair - and bit you?

We think the designers really missed the boat by leaving that out. The challenge of the fight would have been truly intense if you were trying to avoid being crushed while climbing a Colossus. It would still have been possible, thanks to how slow they are, but you'd have an even greater sense of accomplishment aftwerwards.  

Instead, some of the fights were actually somewhat tedious. Because the only thing a Colossus does to try and get you off of him is shake around. That’s it. The only tension at that point is created by your grip meter - as the boss shakes, your grip strength lowers, and eventually you could fall off.  Even falling off isn't so bad, because it doesn’t hurt much, but you’ll have to climb back up, which makes things even more tedious.
The shaking thing is fine for some of the animal-shaped bosses - of course a turtle can’t grab at you - but for the human-shaped ones and some others, we don’t see why they can’t try to swat or grab you.  It would add some needed challenge to the game.  As it was, we had very little difficulty with any of the bosses - at least, not once we were climbing on them.  And that was disappointing.

Like/Hate Score:

Overall, Shadow of the Colossus is a good game that could have been a great one. I salute the designers’ incredible and ambitious vision, the excellent art design, and the scale and scope of their accomplishment. But the problems it has get in the way of all its good points, and the game left me with the feeling that it could have been much better with a bit of attention to the broken camera, a little tweaking of its boss fights (as mentioned above), and a little more fleshing out of the game outside of its signature boss battles.

So - our appreciation of this game for what it is gets balanced by our disappointment with some of the game mechanics, and our longing for what it could have been. 

On our scale of 5-10, we’re giving it an 8.

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