Enslaved is a lot of mediocre with a touch of excellence. The excellence mostly being the art direction and actor performances. It's a very pretty apocalypse that looks pretty good even 10 years later. And I know it might be contentious, but I love Ninja Theory's willingness to use FMV. The story is not particularly novel and includes some baffling moments with an anticlimactic ending that I don't find any artistic merit in. It's strong enough to give you a small tug to wonder what will happen next, but it will not leave you with many thoughts besides like "Why?" for certain moments. The experience of playing the game is mostly swapping between alright character action combat and a variety of different kinds of segments that all boil down to the game telling you exactly what to do. There's nothing particularly wrong or outstanding about the combat on the whole besides how much the camera can wobble around while bashing enemies. The game gives you no time to try to solve any puzzles on your own. Characters are constantly telling you how exactly to get through any bit of exploratory adversity and you will rarely miss any climbing footholds because instead of designing the terrain to be readable they simply made every bit of them shine. The only things that aren't explicitly telegraphed are the collectible tech orbs, which I feel detract from the game's stronger points. Trip is yelling at me, saying we need to go before the mechs catch us and here I am, like a jerk, scrounging for non-descript science balls. I've ragged on it a lot, but it's not a terrible time.