Have you ever wanted to hunt down Fallen Angels that possess unimaginable power. Aided by weapons and armor granted to you by God himself? No? Well anyways, now you can live that fantasy out.
You’ll play as Enoch through the course of El Shaddai. A human given the herculean task of saving the world from a “Great Flood.” In order to do so he must defeat and purify the Grigori, a sect of Fallen Angels who were, at one time, tasked with protecting the Earth. Though you are not sent empty handed. You re given weapons and armor provided by God himself.
You’ll use three weapons on your quest to clip some angelic wings. The Gale, a quick firing ranged weapon. The Arch, your medium damage and quick melee weapon. Last, is the Veil. A slow and devastating melee weapon. Each weapon has different attacks but all use the same basic combos. Which does not offer much depth, but will offer some aid considering the extremely fast pace of the action. At certain times you feel like a master of the fighting system, other times it becomes a pain trying to time your attacks just right to pull off the needed combo.
My favorite part of the fighting system is easily the Overboost ability. After about halfway through the game, the archangel Uriel will offer you his aid. Allowing you to overboost, which greatly increases your damage and allowing you to perform a super-move that will come in incredibly handy. You’ll long to hear “Allow me to help.” Along with the overboost ability comes a nice choir filled anthem of epicness.
Not much has been mentioned on the music of El Shaddai unfortunately. I believe that music accounts for a major part of an entire game’s experience. Even though El Shaddai’s musical score may not blow you away I thought it was worth mentioning as with most games lately I cannot even recall one theme from them.
Of course I’m going to talk about the artistic style. While being beautiful as well as down right breathtaking, it can also be obscuring and a down right pain in the ass. This probably could’ve been easily avoided if players had the ability to control the camera angle. Some of the most difficult parts of the game are the platforming sections. This difficulty is further increased by the inability to properly judge distance and depth as you try to look through a thousand color fog. Add that to the fact that you can’t move the camera to get a decent view of the area you trying to cross and it just becomes a pain more than a joy.
The last piece of the puzzle I would like to mention are the boss battles. You can cover just about every boss battle in this game with the word “cheap.” Most of the bosses have 2-3 abilites that are unblockable and they do not hesistate to spam them. Given the fact that your combos that are meant to be unblockable are blockable by the bosses and the fighting system almost falls apart. You can’t block anything (even if you do your weapon will be shattered) and they can block everything. As well as when a boss takes damage it rarely reacts. Maybe a flash of light on the armor but that is it. They keep moving forward, only briefly falling down after you’ve accumulated enough damage.
There are some moments of this game that will go into my “That was bad ass” memory section of video games. Everything this game does it does very well, but my disappointment comes from the fact that I could see this game being truly amazing.
[easyreview title=”El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron Overall Score 7/10” cat1title=”Gameplay 7/10” cat1detail=”” cat1rating=”7/10″ cat2title=”Story 8/10” cat2detail=”” cat2rating=”8/10″ cat3title=”Controls 6/10” cat3detail=”” cat3rating=”6/10″ summary=”ignore“]
