I'm obviously a bit late to the party here. There's a lot that's been said about Shadow of the Colossus, and it deserves a lot of the recognition it gets. However, there's also a lot of things that don't hold up very well playing it for the first time now. You can see its influence all over modern games, but that doesn't mean that going back to the source of some of those inspirations is necessarily fun. The core idea here is great, a boss rush with a puzzle slant to the boss design, and a beautiful open world to explore. Unfortunately both of those aspects kind of fell apart for me by the end.
The bosses start out very easy, and you can run through them comically fast. Difficulty ramps up later on, but not in a way that's very fun or engaging. Whenever I got stuck, it was due to a puzzle solution being obtuse, and whether I eventually figured it out, or it was one of the handful of times I ended up looking up how to do something, it almost never felt satisfying to figure out or to actually execute. The last two were especially egregious, and both took way too long to climb back up if you did the wrong thing. The only kind of mechanical difficulty comes from the poor controls, or falling off of a colossus and having to repeat a section, either due to running out of stamina or getting tired of holding the grip trigger. They seemingly decided that you should really feel like you're hanging on for your life by giving you hand pain through the controls. Also while you're on the colossus, it trying to shake you off often seems random or glitchy, and leads to a lot of just holding a direction and hoping it gives you a second to climb, or mashing the button trying to figure out when the opening for your attack is supposed to be. It looks nice, but the gameplay doesn't really line up with that experience. Beyond having to hold down a trigger for 90% of the game, this does a lot of other things with the controls that game devs have mostly learned just not to do anymore, even on the supposedly improved "modern" controls in the remake. The colossi and their environments are suitably impressive visually, and the scale of them is communicated very well. That at least was good enough to keep me going.
The struggles with the controls continue in the open world, where you have far and away the worst controlling horse in any video game and a camera more concerned with cinematic angles than letting you see where you're going. I can understand the idea behind wanting more weighty, realistic, and less responsive horse controls, but they went way too far with it here. If Agro is within 50 feet of even a slight bump in the terrain, much less narrow walls, he'll often refuse to move or go at a glacial pace, and turning feels like you're playing with over a second of input delay. Doing things on horseback like using your sword's guiding light or the bow is also a pain with the way the controls are laid out. The light showing you your next objective is an interesting idea I suppose, but combined with the way the world is laid out and how long it takes to traverse it, it ended up just being an especially annoying objective marker with a lot of trial and error of going down long narrow passages between mountains to find out a full minute or two later that it wasn't the way to go. The world looks nice, but you'll quickly realize there's not much to do or see here. I love exploration in games and am totally fine with it being mostly self-motivated, I definitely wouldn't expect this to be littered with side quests and collectibles like many modern open world games, but it just never really motivated me to explore here. There are collectibles, but they just never really caught my interest and I have no idea what they do. The map feels like just empty padding for the already short runtime.
I'm conflicted on the story, I think the simple setup is cool and worked well, but being given nothing over the course of the game that adds to it starts to feel repetitive, and being taken back to the hub feels like a missed opportunity to add basically anything here. Then at the end there's the big story dump, and I don't know that I really liked where it went. Maybe I would have been more okay with it if there was any kind of natural build up there, or hinting at what was happening, but it's just a long cutscene after the game is over. The pacing felt really off, and I would have been much more okay with the game just ending before any of that and leaving it up to interpretation more.
This review is pretty negative, but I really had an alright time overall. The game kept my attention and I finished it pretty quickly, it just has a lot of issues that I haven't seen talked about much, while its praises don't really need repeating by me. Still worth a try, if for nothing else, at least to see how important it is to gaming history.
The bosses start out very easy, and you can run through them comically fast. Difficulty ramps up later on, but not in a way that's very fun or engaging. Whenever I got stuck, it was due to a puzzle solution being obtuse, and whether I eventually figured it out, or it was one of the handful of times I ended up looking up how to do something, it almost never felt satisfying to figure out or to actually execute. The last two were especially egregious, and both took way too long to climb back up if you did the wrong thing. The only kind of mechanical difficulty comes from the poor controls, or falling off of a colossus and having to repeat a section, either due to running out of stamina or getting tired of holding the grip trigger. They seemingly decided that you should really feel like you're hanging on for your life by giving you hand pain through the controls. Also while you're on the colossus, it trying to shake you off often seems random or glitchy, and leads to a lot of just holding a direction and hoping it gives you a second to climb, or mashing the button trying to figure out when the opening for your attack is supposed to be. It looks nice, but the gameplay doesn't really line up with that experience. Beyond having to hold down a trigger for 90% of the game, this does a lot of other things with the controls that game devs have mostly learned just not to do anymore, even on the supposedly improved "modern" controls in the remake. The colossi and their environments are suitably impressive visually, and the scale of them is communicated very well. That at least was good enough to keep me going.
The struggles with the controls continue in the open world, where you have far and away the worst controlling horse in any video game and a camera more concerned with cinematic angles than letting you see where you're going. I can understand the idea behind wanting more weighty, realistic, and less responsive horse controls, but they went way too far with it here. If Agro is within 50 feet of even a slight bump in the terrain, much less narrow walls, he'll often refuse to move or go at a glacial pace, and turning feels like you're playing with over a second of input delay. Doing things on horseback like using your sword's guiding light or the bow is also a pain with the way the controls are laid out. The light showing you your next objective is an interesting idea I suppose, but combined with the way the world is laid out and how long it takes to traverse it, it ended up just being an especially annoying objective marker with a lot of trial and error of going down long narrow passages between mountains to find out a full minute or two later that it wasn't the way to go. The world looks nice, but you'll quickly realize there's not much to do or see here. I love exploration in games and am totally fine with it being mostly self-motivated, I definitely wouldn't expect this to be littered with side quests and collectibles like many modern open world games, but it just never really motivated me to explore here. There are collectibles, but they just never really caught my interest and I have no idea what they do. The map feels like just empty padding for the already short runtime.
I'm conflicted on the story, I think the simple setup is cool and worked well, but being given nothing over the course of the game that adds to it starts to feel repetitive, and being taken back to the hub feels like a missed opportunity to add basically anything here. Then at the end there's the big story dump, and I don't know that I really liked where it went. Maybe I would have been more okay with it if there was any kind of natural build up there, or hinting at what was happening, but it's just a long cutscene after the game is over. The pacing felt really off, and I would have been much more okay with the game just ending before any of that and leaving it up to interpretation more.
This review is pretty negative, but I really had an alright time overall. The game kept my attention and I finished it pretty quickly, it just has a lot of issues that I haven't seen talked about much, while its praises don't really need repeating by me. Still worth a try, if for nothing else, at least to see how important it is to gaming history.