Zeno Clash
By Lewis Denby
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
