Shadow of the Colossus Review

Retro review? Does a game from the previous generation of consoles count?

I have really mixed feelings on this one.

Short review: cool bosses, great music, terrible story, awful controls, busted camera, a boring world, and a sucky hero. I'll just take these one at a time to flesh this thing out.

-There are sixteen colossi to defeat in this game. They vary in size, shape and difficulty. They have different weak spots all over their bodies. You must climb all over them hitting the spots, all while being swatted and holding on for dear life. There's a nice variation. Some have clubs, some fly, some are heavily armored, some require you to use your horse just to keep up, some require you to get creative with the environment. Each colossi almost seems like a gigantic, moving puzzle that you must defeat to move on. Bringing down one of the bosses is extremely gratifying once you accomplish it. Sometimes these battles will last as long as thirty minutes as you try to figure exactly what to do next........or frustratingly get thrown off and plummet back to the ground.

-The world is oddly silent until you come across one of the colossi. The music stirs to life along with each creature, ramping up significantly when you finally manage to climb onto the beast. The tunes vary from one boss to the next, but each theme is very heroic and fitting, considering the task at hand.

-Story? What story? You ride your horse into a massive temple, set your dead girlfriend on an altar and speak to a disembodied voice. You plead with it to bring your woman's soul back from the dead. In order for this to happen, you must roam the land, find and defeat sixteen colossi.

-This is a big one. The controls in this game are monumentally awful. I had to make various adjustments in the menu before I could even begin to play. I had to change look sensitivity, invert the x AND y axis. You run extremely slowly, almost like you have a broken ankle. You seem to have no agility, which is a huge detriment considering you have to climb all over these hulking, squirming colossi to succeed. The jump is really floaty yet difficult to control. Jumping away from a platform while hanging onto it proves to be quite a chore. Also, it took an average of three attempts to simply just get onto the horse. "Jump" and "get on horse" are both the same button, so I would typically set myself up in the proper position, hit the button and instead of getting on the horse....I would jump past it like an A-hole. I didn't discover until about three-quarters of the way into the game that I could hold R1 ("Grab") to assist in getting onto the horse. A little in-game tip might have been useful there. And while I'm talking about the horse, IT has awful controls also. The "steering" on it is terrible and good luck if the camera forces you into a corner (more on that later). While it's certainly faster than going on foot, I never got the sensation of traveling really fast. It's more like a contented trot than a purposeful gallop.

-I HATE the camera on this game. In the thick of combat, it insists on staying right on you. It rarely pulls back to give you a great perspective. It will also "wander" on its own, which proved to be the most frustrating for the flying colossi in the desert. I'm riding the horse trying to fight with the camera so I can actually SEE the beast on the right side of the horse, instead of rotating around to look at NOTHING on the left. Also, when you're riding through the barren land, the camera is always positioned almost at ground level, making it very difficult to see where you're going. This means that you cannot see if a cliff or any sort of drop in terrain is upcoming. Really, really annoying and frustrating.

-The world in this game is a "forbidden land." It definitely creates a sense of isolation, but also a sense of boredom. There is NOTHING to do in this huge world except fight the colossi. I discovered later that there are some collectibles in the game, which actually kinda frustrated me. There are tiny lizards you can shoot to upgrade your "Grip" meter (how long you can hold onto the colossi) and fruit to extend your health bar. I had no idea these even existed. I don't like when games hold your hand for everything, but maybe a little tip to just let me know these things existed would have been pretty nice.

-This game gives me no reason to care about what this character is going through. We see none of his history with this woman. Why should I even care what he's trying to do? Why do I want to bring this person back? I feel like I'm just going through the motions here. Going through the motions with terrible controls. This brings up kind of a sticky point, though. How often do we really even care about what we're doing in games? I mean, this plot is quite similar to every "Mario" game in existence (save the Princess!) but....but....I like playing Mario games! I didn't like playing this, and I hate to boil it down to something so simple, but it really comes down to the controls. I like playing games with great controls. I can forgive sloppy storytelling or butthole characters or boring worlds if I get clean, fun gameplay, and Shadow of the Colossus just doesn't have it.

This game is.....colossally overrated. Zing!