After 10 years, Foster returns to Union City and finds it bright and gleaming. He starts at ‘look at what Joey did with the city.’, progresses to ‘what did Joey do to the city?’, and ends at: “JOEY, YOU DID WHAT TO THE CITY?!?”. To be clear; this is an adventure game. It is story heavy, and low intensity. There is effectively zero combat, timed puzzles, or much other than dialogue, cut scenes, walking around, and interacting with objects. I don’t know why this game has an ‘action’ tag on it. This game is about as much an action game as Driving Miss Daisy was an action movie. To the game’s credit, it does keep the story moving at a brisk pace and avoids a common adventure game pitfall of item overload. Almost all temporary items get used fairly shortly after being found and my final inventory wasn’t extensive. The game also has a built-in hint system. So this is an easy game to get into if you aren’t generally a fan of ‘click everywhere, try everything’ adventure games. Gameplay will probably run you 6-10 hours, with a lot of dialogue & cut scenes. It might be a lot shorter if you use a guide and skip everything you can, in which case, go play something else you heathen. The game certainly has its share of issues. The dialogue is decent, but predictable. NPC pathing is a bit wonky and leads them to be slide-walking into you at times. Some of the gesture animations are poorly timed, screwing up the impact of the dialogue. The NPC character design suffers from ‘Current Year’-itis. The built-in hint system isn’t very context sensitive, so you can get hints for completed parts of the current objective. It can be an annoyance at times to get to the correct menu choice on a NPC before it wanders away. None of these are show-stoppers, just pebble-in-your-shoe irritants. I don’t typically play adventure games, but I found this decent enough, if tepid. On the gameplay & story alone, this game is a mid to low 3, but it is getting rounded up to 4 for the art.
Unlike a lot of the reviews here, I came to this game totally fresh having never played it, let alone heard of it. As of tonight I have finished both the light and the dark side campaigns, having played though them both on medium. The game has a lot good things in it. It has a great atmosphere that oozes style and personality along with a lot of good ideas trying to shine through; the multiple character options and armor is actually worn and not just a general damage reduction. The result of the latter is that armor has spots it doesn’t protect, and you can aim for them. It’s quite satisfying to take down the knight who’s charging you while decked in full armor because you shot him in the eye. However, this is all marred by one gigantic flaw: the combat. The combat in Enclave is rough at best and infuriatingly broken at worst. For a hack and slash game, a game in which the core mechanic is combat, this is an unforgivable sin. It would be like designing a sports car with a two cylinder engine. The problems are largely due to two issues; flakiness in registering a hit and AI behavior. I’ve had numerous occasions where my attacks simply pass right through the enemy or some missile fly through a solid piece of scenery. This is doubly egregious when I’m using a ranged weapon because the targeting rectile will tell you when you are on ‘target’. Seeing one of your very limited high-end arrows fly right through an enemy head as if it had all the substance of a modern celebrity inflames all the wrong kinds of passions. The enemy’s diet must consist of coffee and jumping beans because they are terribly prone to twitch juking and jumping around as if the world was a trampoline, even while wearing full plate armor. Now this isn’t too bad in melee and not too awful in ranged combat when you have weapons that traverse the distance effectively instantly. However, I had none of those things for I was playing the ranged class and relying on arrows. When the enemy is in full kangaroo on a sugar high mode I can easily spend four arrows for every hit at medium range. Now before you think I’m just someone who can’t hit the broad side of a barn, I would point out that such jumping behavior is either looked down on or forcibly restricted in almost every single multiplayer FPS precisely for how it makes the jumper nigh unhittable. There is a third lesser issue with the combat and that is some of the hostiles seem unbalanced. For example, in the light campaign there are enemy sorcerers whose primary attack is a bolt attack which will sap half your health in one hit. Oh, did I mention that these bolts are homing and that a single sorcerer can have several of them in the air at once? I have two final nagging issues. Firstly, the game still uses checkpoints. This wouldn’t be surprising in a console game, but this is still in the computer release. The usage of checkpoints seems to serve the sole purpose of providing a mechanic for the player to lose coins on death (which will happen at any difficulty above easy). Nothing else happens you die. All the enemies stay dead, everything stays collected, and switches stay pulled. You only have to lose some coins and walk back to where you were and I can’t imagine the checkpoints are there to make you walk for a couple minutes. So the continued existence of checkpoints feels wrong. If you die before reaching a checkpoint? You have to restart the mission. This last bit is a sore spot for me because some of the levels don’t have a checkpoint, or the checkpoint is after a boss or some hairy fight (when it should be before), which means if you die you have to replay the whole mission. Secondly, the in-game cutscenes can’t be skipped, which is a bit of a nuisance if you have to replay an area a few times. The game does have a very unforgiving difficulty curve and with the reliance on precise aiming I can see how this would be a nightmare to play on a console. While there are a lot of good ideas in the game, the ideas are rough around the edges and don’t fit snugly with each other. I keep being tempted to bump it up to a three, much like you might feel inclined to say that your abusive ex wasn’t *that* bad, but then I keep remembering about the flawed combat. For all the game has going for it, I still can’t forgive that.
