Impressions: New on PSN- Enslaved and Blade Kitten demos

Just this week, the Playstation Network launched two new demos for the upcoming games Enslaved and Blade Kitten. I downloaded them, had a chance to play, and here's what I thought.

I don't know why he's so angry, but it's probably the mechanized dog/frog chasing him. She seems to be okay with this.

Enslaved is a new game from Namco Bandai where you play as an angry, perpetually shirtless dude and hit stuff with a stick while running around a post-apocalyptic world filled with robots. Visually, Enslaved is beautiful, building a futuristic world where modern urban sprawl has been overtaken by lush vegetation and where machines seem to be king of the hill as far as things you don't want to mess with. The exploration and controls are reminiscent of Uncharted in that you do a lot of running, jumping, and climbing from barely-climbable-object to I-wouldn't-have-jumped-there-if-it-wasn't-glowing, but instead of thoughtful puzzle solving Enslaved is complemented with fast-paced melee combat against various automatons that would rather you didn't exist.

The Enslaved demo is short, clocking in at maybe 10 minutes if you take your time, but it gives you a good feel for Enslaved's world. You start off in a prison ship of some sort, not totally unlike the beginning of the movie Pitch Black, and you break out after some chick does some voodoo to a computer system and everything starts going haywire. From there, you have to fight your way from the tail end of this gigantic airborne monstrosity all the way up to the front where escape pods are rapidly being launched away. On the way, you regain your weapon (a retractable staff that idles on your right forearm; you can see it in the screenshot), encounter some mechs that you have to beat up, and have a bit of platforming to do.

All in all, I thought the platforming controlled well in that it was smooth, reasonably intuitive, and had a good deal of error correction to prevent you from making really stupid mistakes like running haphazardly off the wing of a moving airship. Even trying to be stupid and kill myself in strange ways, Enslaved wouldn't let me, so it was both strange and comforting to know that my gameplay wouldn't come to a screeching halt because I just barely missed some stupid jump.

However, the combat felt a bit disjointed, kind of the way I'd imagine marionettes fighting each other. There wasn't much smoothness between actions, such as between light and heavy attacks, attacking and blocking or dodging, and the stun attack and just about anything else. I'm hoping for tweaks to the combat system to just make it feel a bit more fluid before this game comes out in the beginning of October because everything else seemed to be in place. I'm also hoping that playing the full game will reveal a bit more depth to the characters seeing as I couldn't have cared less about either of their fates based solely on the demo.

Enslaved releases on October 8th for the Playstation 3 (PS3). 

As far as I can tell, the blonde chick just wants the pink-haired furry's pregnancy test. I'm really not too sure.

The above is a moment from one of the first few seconds of a quirky new game, Blade Kitten, where as far as I can tell you jump from platform to platform while collecting dissociated point-awarding objects and spamming square and circle to beat up any enemies that get in your way. 

Basically it goes like this: You move around with the analog stick. You can move faster if you press R2. You hit stuff that's close with square, using a blade that hovers near you at all times and lashes out via some mysterious force, and you hit stuff that's far away using circle. The X button jumps and somewhere in there are buttons to block and to stab your sword into the ground (so you don't get blown away by strong winds or so you can make precision jumps, of course). That's really the entire game, as far as I can tell. You move from point A to point B repeating those actions until you reach some conclusion or checkpoint or I don't really know, since I didn't actually finish the demo.

Blade Kitten certainly has character, as you can definitely tell from the screenshot above, but I'm just not sure what else it offers. Perhaps there is some ethereal quality of "goodness" a la the classic forms of Plato that I'm simply not experiencing and it will magically dawn on me at some point. Perhaps I would look good with a handlebar mustache and a goatee. These both seem to be things that the world may never know.