Shadow of the Colossus

"More like shadow of a colossal pile of crap"

Shadow of the Colossus has an interesting premise: go on a journey throughout a vast world to defeat 16 colossi, and only those 16 colossi. There are no other enemies to fight in this game. Does this formula make a great game? Read on to find out.

Graphics – 5/10
The PS2 may be getting old, but it is capable of producing graphics much better than what this game has to offer; games like Metal Gear Solid 2 and Final Fantasy X are proof of this. This game suffers from an effect used in most PS2 games recently: a hazy, fuzzy look which is not quite clear or sharp, and there is either a lot of pop-up or just a great lack of detail. The cutscenes look slightly better than gameplay graphics, but not by much.

Your character model looks decent; however he has a white outline on most of his body, which is noticeable when you're running in a dark area. The model of the main character has pretty good animations, except for his running animation. When he runs he looks strangely like Chris Redfield from Resident Evil for PS1.

The colossi are impressive for their size, and that is about it. They also suffer greatly from the haze-looking effect. You cannot really see the detail that well, even when you are up close.

The overworld you travel through is massive, but offers little to be seen. There is almost no detail at all. It is just a large, open field with a dead tree placed randomly once in a while. You may also encounter a shrine or two on the overworld. I could understand that the graphics are not so great if there was a lot of content in the game, but there is not. The only upside to the overworld is that there are no load times while you explore it.

Sound – 3/10
The sound is negligible in this game. Most of the time there is no music; you just hear the footsteps of your character as he runs around. During dialogues between characters, a gibberish language is spoken. There are subtitles, but the goal is to convey that this is a true fantasy world.

The music that plays during fights against the colossi tries to sound epic, but falls short. During my fight with the first colossi, I barely noticed the music. The sound of my sword hitting the armor of the colossi was bolder than the music was.

Sound effects are tolerable. None of them sound bad, but they are not outstanding in any way. They are mostly very basic, from your sword strikes against hard surfaces and the colossi to your character whistling for his horse.

Controls – 3/10
The controls for your character are not bad per se, because they are customizable, but some subtleties ruin the control in this game. First of all, the camera is horrible. You have free control over it to position it anywhere you want around your character. However, the camera has a nasty habit of always snapping back where it wants to be rather than where you need it to be so you can make a jump or not fall off of a ledge. When you are running on the overworld the camera stays behind your character mostly, although not directly behind and a little off to the side. One problem I have is that the camera does not look forward enough. It points slightly down, so that you only see what is several feet in front of your character unless you move the camera yourself. Of course, once you release the right analog stick, the camera goes back to where it wants to. The camera is slightly more manageable when you fight one of the colossi, because you can lock the camera's focus onto it by holding L1. That way you can at least dodge some attacks.

You can move your character around on foot, on horseback, or in the water. Just moving your character around is nice and simple, but there's either something wrong with my controller, or the main character just refuses to run in a straight line. I find myself constantly jinking him left and right as I run across a field. The main character can climb surfaces that he can get a grip on by holding R1. Climbing is fairly easy to control. The only thing I didn't like is that you must press triangle to hoist yourself up onto a ledge, instead of the character doing it automatically.

Riding on horseback is a control nightmare. Your horse will not go anywhere by tilting the control stick in any direction. You must repeatedly tap the X button if you want the horse to move forward at anything faster than a slow walking pace. Once you get up to galloping speed, you must keep on pressing the X button, otherwise the horse will just slow down to that barely walking pace, even though you don't want it to. Steering your horse is a pain, too. While you are tapping the X button, your horse will go straight as long as you do not touch the left analog stick. While galloping at a fast pace, you cannot steer your horse just a little bit. You can only make him do hard right or hard left turns, or make him stop by holding down on the left analog stick. When I played this game, I gave up the speed the horse offers in exploring the world in exchange for being able to control where I wanted to go by just going on foot the entire time.

Story – 1/10
Unless this game is the sequel to a game I do not know about, there is pretty much no plot. At the beginning of the game, the main character's girlfriend is dead of causes unknown to the player, and the main character wants to use a shrine which might be able to bring her back to life. In order to use the power of the shrine, the 16 colossi, who have power over it, must be defeated. So you go on a quest to kill these 16 colossi, who have done nothing evil, just because the main character wants to resurrect his girlfriend. For me, this just wasn't enough motivation to explore a vast empty world searching for the colossi and then slaying them just for being there.

Gameplay – 1/10
I'll say this first and foremost: there are no enemies in this game other than the 16 colossi. You spend the entire game traveling throughout the vast overworld, and fighting the colossi when you find them. The colossi are not pointed out to you, you must find them based on vague clues you get after you defeat a colossi. With absolutely no threat of any enemies hunting you down, exploring the vast world gets boring quickly.

In order to find these colossi, you must use your sword to focus a “guiding light.” If you hold down the circle button, your character holds his sword up to the sky as it gathers light. You use the left analog stick to point the light in any direction. When the light focuses, you can go in that direction to find the colossi. This doesn't really work though. I did this for about twenty minutes after defeating my first colossi, and the light did not focus in any direction I faced, even going around in complete circles.

This leaves you to use your “map” if you want to call it that. You bring up the map by pausing the game with the start button. You can move the map around with the left analog stick, and zooming with the R2 button. You soon find that the map isn't very useful because it has no detail, and it has what appear to be clouds drawn onto it. These clouds don't go away once you explored an area either, like other games. They stay there. I honestly don't know who in their right mind would put clouds on a hand drawn map. So there are areas which leave you confused because your map is of no help, the overworld is massive, and there are no landmarks anywhere to make a distinction between any other place in the game.

When you finally encounter a colossus, you have to do the same thing every time: stun it, climb on top of it, and stab it in its weak spot. It will take a little while to figure out how to climb on top of each colossus, but it gets easier after you fight the first few of them. When you are holding onto the moving colossus, you have a grip meter displayed which shows how much longer your character can hang from a vertical surface before he falls.

During the fights with the colossi, you don't really feel threatened or rushed to find out how to slay the creature. They will attack you if they can, but sometimes they will just walk away from you.

Your weapons include a sword and a bow. The bow seems to have an infinite supply of arrows. But the sword is what you'll mostly be using to defeat a colossus. When you finally reach a colossus' vital weak point, you hold down the square button to gain strength for a stab with your sword. The longer you hold the button down, the stronger your strike will be.

You have a health meter displayed on your screen, which obviously shows you how much vitality you have. You die when this runs out, but that won't be happening often because you regain health just by standing still. You can regain health faster if you crouch down.

When you're searching for the colossi, you'll notice that there are no enemies besides the colossi trying to thwart you in your attempts to gain the power of this mysterious “forbidden” land. This makes little sense, because so much emphasis is placed on the land where the colossi reside being sacred ground which no human may ever travel. If that is the case, why is it so easy for the main character to just slowly ride in on his horse as if he owns the place? The lack of non-colossi enemies really hurts the gameplay and hurts the atmosphere that you're traveling in a forbidden area.

Overall – 1/10
This game simply has too many flaws to be considered even remotely fun. The only pleasure I would think someone may be able to derive from playing this game is figuring out the “puzzle” that is trying to defeat each colossus. It may be a puzzle, but the bad controls and graphics take all of the fun out of it. Basically, I do not recommend this game to anyone to rent or buy.

Reviewer's Score: 1/10, Originally Posted: 03/25/08

Game Release: Shadow of the Colossus (US, 10/18/05)