Format: Xbox 360 | Genre: Fighting | Publisher: Atlus | Developer: ACE Team | Release date: 05/05/10 | Price: £11

Lewis Anderson gears up for the fight in ZENO CLASH: ULTIMATE EDITION.

I’M NOT a fighting man. It’s not something that has ever really appealed to me. I mean, like most people I’ve been in a handful of one-punch situations, where someone fuelled by alcohol gets annoyed and lashes out. Usually with a lame punch that hurts the thrower more, it’s immediately followed by a bombardment of apologies and the forging a beautiful friendship for the rest of the night.

In fact, I have such little fighting capability that if I were ever to be in an actual, real fight then all the king’s horses and all the king’s men wouldn’t be able to put me together again. So with all my heart I thank ACE Team for Zeno Clash, for the chance to experience bare-knuckle fighting only without the inevitable nightmare of being operated on by horses.

First-person fighter

Zeno Clash, first released on the PC last year, now comes to Xbox Live Arcade in the form of an Ultimate Edition. Featuring new moves, weapons and a co-operative chop-til-you-drop mode, it expands on what is a bizarre yet entertaining romp focused on first-person melée combat.

As though channelling the spirits of vintage games like Streets of Rage, Zeno Clash throws you into brawl after outnumbered brawl. An abundance of weird-looking opponents, made up of humans, animals and barbaric psychopaths, aim to reduce you to a pulp. There’s only one way to stop them from doing that – and it’s not with a friendly chat over a beer.

Armed with fists, feet, elbows and a selection of weapons, the main character throws everything he can at whoever stands in his way. Playing a fighting game in first-person often feels clumsy, but in Zeno Clash it’s implemented rather well, and I found myself occasionally flinching in real life from enemy punches.

We follow the protagonist in flight from his brothers and sisters after killing the head of his family, the multi-gendered FatherMother. Switching back and forth between exploring the events preceding and following the murder, the plot unfolds between bouts fought in enclosed areas that, although limited, give you enough space to outmanoeuvre when surrounded, which is often.

All of this is set in a world which is plucked straight from a dream: giant dinosaur-like creatures stalk vast eerie deserts, eccentric barbarians inhabit foreboding forests, and petrified sentinels haunt forgotten temples. Thematically, Zeno Clash is spot on. The primitive firearms you use, shamanistic settlements you visit and appearance of the characters you encounter contribute to the feeling of an unfolding, developed world, even though game areas are presented linearly and are completely enclosed.

The soundtrack is worth a mention too. When escaping the scene of a crime through an untamed wilderness you need to feel scared and isolated, and sinister instruments play aptly in the background, communicating the feeling of a man on the run.

The new co-op mode is fun and fast, and having one extra person helping you fight up the floors of a tower or descending through the depths of a pit really makes a difference. Since opponents can only attack who they target, it’s easy for the player not being attacked to step behind an enemy and unleash hell upon their kidneys. Or which ever organs it is elephant-men keep in their lower back.

Short but sweet

The greatest compliment I can pay is that, playing all the way through in one sitting, not at any point was I bored. While fist-based combat can be repetitive, there’s a lot of satisfaction in landing a punch and dodging enemy blows. Using a weapon when you can helps mix up the action enough to keep things fresh and never dull. On top of that the game moves from area to area at a swift pace, compelling you to play on while the action switches from pre- to post-murder in what is unfortunately a fairly thin – though ultimately serviceable – plot.

There’s a few twists and turns along the way, and some intriguing moments fighting through ancient ruins, but this is a short game and the focus is on the combat, as it should be. And it’s a lot of fun. Much better than getting in a real fight.

7/10

What does this score mean?

Format: Xbox360 | Genre: Fighting/FPS | Publisher: Atlus | Developer: ACE Team | ETA: 30/03/10

On the PC, Zeno Clash featured among our favourite games of last year. A spectacular synergy of face-punching and first-person shooting, it included a giant bird-man-woman and a collection of dinosaur-giraffe-elephants. It was just a little bit insane.

But, importantly, it was really, really good. Considering Zeno Clash was Chilean developer ACE Team’s first release, it emerged wonderfully polished, with tighter first-person melee mechanics than pretty much any competitor.  Its world was a strange and beautiful one – so much so that I took it upon myself to chat to them about it just recently.

At the end of March, this miraculous indie game hits the 360, through the good old Xbox Live Arcade service. Better still, it’s in the form of an Ultimate Edition.

“We always wanted to create a game for all platforms,” explains co-designer Carlos Bordeu, “but for a startup studio, getting a game published on a console is too hard. It was the success of the PC game which has allowed us to create a special version for the Xbox 360, and we’re very happy to be able to reach the console crowd with our bizarre title.”

“We were approached on more than one occasion by Microsoft before we teamed up with [XBLA publisher] Atlus,” adds Bordeu’s brother, Andres, the other lead designer on the project. “The game generated a lot of buzz and the post release scenario put us in touch with a lot of people. We got many requests from the community to get the game on the Xbox 360 and we felt it would fit really well in the XBLA catalogue.”

CARE IN THE COMMUNITY
Punching, kicking, knee-jabbing and firepowering your way through an fantasy alien landscape, Zeno Clash places you in the boots of an outcast, driven away from his home after apparently killing the ominous Father-Mother, for reasons undisclosed at the start of the game. Being on the run, alongside a woman with the most inexplicable hairdo, sees you traversing vast a desert while hunting rabbits, engaging in several showdowns with an explosive-squirrel-sporting maniac, and even travelling to the end of the world.

But that’s just the main game. The Ultimate Edition has more. Its major addition is a co-operative mode, which allows you to play through the extra challenge levels – taking place inside an enormous tower – with a friend. “We have been asked for some sort of multiplayer component for a long time and we’re happy to be including that now,” says Carlos.

Other minor tweaks have been made based on feedback from the PC community. And listening to criticism from the fans is an integral part of how ACE Team build their future work, says Andres. “As developers, we’re really active at the official forums discussing with people who are playing the game or just want to learn more about the crazy world we created. We’re also always on the lookout for reviews and media reactions. It’s important for us to stay in touch with our fans and the media because through their input we can improve our future games. We’re going to be really active in the web after we release Zeno Clash: Ultimate Edition.”

We’ll be bringing you a full review of the game when it arrives on the 360 on 30 March – just in case our 8/10 review of the PC original wasn’t enough to convince you. Worried about taking the plunge on such a surreal game? Carlos Bordeu has some words of encouragement. “Play the trial when it’s out and give it a try – I’m sure you’ll be surprised,” he says. “Where else can you play a game where the antagonist is a huge hermaphrodite creature, eh?” By Lewis Denby

You might expect ACE Team to work from some sort of colourful crazy house, the walls painted with vibrant, dreamlike murals.

They don’t. They work in a small, modest office in Santiago, Chile – an eight-strong independent studio who invested everything in their debut project, Zeno Clash. It’s a good job they did. The Source Engine-powered fighting game proved to be one of the most exciting and creative releases of 2009.

“It was born from an older project, which we started developing some years before ACE Team was formed as a professional studio,” explains Andres Bordeu, one of the company’s pair of lead designers. The other is his twin, Carlos, with a third brother, Edmundo, working as Art Director: the A., C. and E of the Team. “At that time, we were granted a demo license of the Lithtech Jupiter System – the same engine used by Monolith’s No One Lives Forever 2 – with which our team tried to create a game called Zenozoik. The goal of this project was to create an action RPG in first-person, but the prototype never took off, mainly because we tried to create something too ambitious for a small studio.”

How, then, did Zeno Clash’s wondrous world come into existence? Its vivid alien landscapes and outlandish character designs are a far cry from most of today’s mainstream releases. In Zeno Clash, the environment feels like part of an enormous, existing culture, of which we’re only seeing a tiny speck. In other words, Zenozoik must have been very ambitious indeed, because Zeno Clash is about as big and bold as indie games come.

“Many years after the development of the prototype, we gathered around our original concept and re-thought the game in a manner that it would focus on few but solid elements that we would be able to produce as a small team,” Andres Bordeu continues. “Our vision had to nail two key elements: the surreal, novel art style and the intense combat in first-person perspective. We needed to scrap all the RPG elements and scale down the game to something that would end up being like a fantasy Double Dragon shooter – a very unusual mix. We knew that we were too few to make a game with large, open and expansive environments, so scaling down the concept of the game was crucial.”

OVER THE HILLS AND FAR AWAY
There was an era when wildly inventive world design ruled. Throughout the 90s, studios experimented with a variety of styles. As the new millennium rolled around, and with it advanced engine technology, these worlds began to shine in a way no one had ever thought possible. The rolling hills of Giants: Citizen Kabuto or the striking otherworldliness of Sacrifice impressed players around the world.

Of course, these games were never in the mainstream. But even iD Software’s early work on the Quake series, Naughty Dog’s insane Crash Bandicoot titles and the legendary Grim Fandango had wowed on a wider scale. Now, it seems as though this creativity is fading, making way for yet another science-fiction romp, or the gritty battlefields of a real-life war.

While Bordeu thinks more grounded, realistic world design can still feature great art, he has noticed a decline in novel videogame settings. “I think it has to do with the avoidance of risk,” he says. “Videogames are consistently getting bigger and more expensive to produce, so for a publisher to develop a title backed up by a known IP or traditional theme would seem the safest bet. Many of today’s games seem to look at competitive titles or related media – like blockbuster movies – when looking for sources of inspiration. You can tell that Star Wars, Alien and war-themed movies are a common source of inspiration for many shooters, or other games from different genres.”

[Continues...]

You know those shamanic rituals in the Amazon, where the tribe members indulge in a little magic brew and spend all day on a journey of enlightenment, travelling to alien planets and conversing with mystical beings?

Zeno Clash is what I imaging partaking in one of these rituals might be like. It’s confusing, often quite disturbing and always completely barmy, but you come out of it feeling like you’re somehow a better person for having been there.

This is a bizarre game from Chilean developers Ace Team, an intriguing juxtaposition of furiously creative aesthetic design and a surprisingly traditional structure. Think Giants: Citizen Kabuto streamlined into a series of arena fist-fights, or Metal Gear Solid on acid. It sits somewhere in between pushing the boundaries of creativity and a reliance on more established game mechanics and storytelling devices. It’s also, despite being primarily a fighting game, entirely first-person.

Very few first-person games manage to pull off these melee-orientated fisticuffs with any real success. Escape From Butcher Bay managed it to some degree, but barely anything else springs to mind – and even that felt somewhat artificial, despite its brutality. Zeno Clash absolutely nails it. The sense of violence is shocking, not because it’s gruesome – it isn’t, really – but because it feels so real, so weighty and viciously intimate. Left mouse lands a simple punch or kick, context-dependent; right mouse lands a heavy thwack to the opponent’s face. You can also block, parry, deflect, dodge and power up an enormous flying thump, as you learn the increasing skillset required for success.

It’s spectacular, though occasionally frustrating. Towards the end of the game you’ll find yourself pitted against an increasing number of foes simultaneously, resulting in a few awkward moments. You ‘lock on’ to a single opponent and automatically circle-strafe around them, and while this is a great help in one-on-one battles, it’s problematic when faced with multiple adept fighters. They have a tendency to surround you, landing unfair and indefensible hits to the back of your skull while you busy yourself with someone else. It’s usually possible to nimbly worm your way out of such encounters, but it still grates.

It’s certainly apparent that the difficulty rises sharply around two-thirds of the way through. This is, unfortunately, where things begin to stagnate a little as well. The pull of the story drags you away from the initial locations, then back again, so by the time the endgame rolls around you’ve seen most of what Zeno Clash has to throw at you. It’s disappointing, particularly when half the thrill of the game comes from delving into the deep unknown. When the finale arrives, and all it has to offer is a string of increasingly challenging boss-fights in places you’ve already visited, something doesn’t sit right. It’s a shame.

It’s a shame primarily because what precedes it is so good – and not just the hands-on combat sections, either. Punctuating the intense voyage are occasional sections of first-person shooting. It feels a little clunky, given the impressiveness of the melee action, but often serves as a nice, relative respite from the usual chaos, and provides for some spellbinding sequences. Zeno Clash peaks around the half-way point, with a frenetic battle through the end of the world and a haunting boat ride back to reality again. A typical, on-rails shooting section it may be, but there’s an incredible visual presence to the journey that lifts it into greatness. Before that, there’s a magnificent fight in an electrical storm, as countless gelatinous beings morph up from the ground. And before that, there’s a moment where you traverse through a rocky passage, then emerge in a vast, open desert, populated by enormous giraffe-elephant hybrids who stomp around the sand ahead of you.

Ace Team have conjured up an obscure yet completely tangible world. Though the main narrative thread is somewhat underdeveloped, with central characters going unexplained and vast portions of the mythos staying in the periphery, the universe around you is completely cemented as an actual place. It’s impressive, given the arena-based structure, to see such a varied yet cohesive environment pulled off with this sort of panache – and it’s testament to the tight pacing that it works so well. There’s an organic aesthetic running through the bones of Zeno Clash, where even inanimate objects seem thoroughly alive. The result is a heavy and utterly bizarre atmosphere, and a story that – until the underwhelming conclusion, at least – becomes far more captivating than it has any right to be.

It’s totally unique – yet totally old-school. It’s fenced-in and unashamedly linear, and the intrinsic mechanics of it all – the actual fighting stuff – aren’t remotely new if you disregard the shift of perspective. It’s all overblown narrative exposition and boss-fights against a small set of iconic bad guys. But Zeno Clash isn’t really about all that. As entertaining as the battles are, they’re not the stand-out moments. The best bits of the game are when it slows the tempo, opens up a little and allows you to soak up the crazy locations. Its crowning achievement is evoking the hallucinogenic fascination of living this place, just existing within something so otherworldly. It feels fresh, because it’s all about the journey, the feelings of awe, the sense of exploring such an alien culture.

Which is why the final portion is such a let-down. There have been far, far worse endings in highly acclaimed games, but in Zeno Clash, a title all about the joy of discovery, it nags. You’ll come back for the challenge mode, a series of individual, decontextualised battles up an enormous tower. And you’ll relish in the ugly, ugly beauty of the aesthetic. But you’ll likely emerge from the main game, over after just five or six hours, feeling a little disenchanted.

Then you’ll sit back and remember the glorious madness of what came before. And, exhausted and bemused, you’ll smile. Zeno Clash is that sort of game.

8/10