Kena: Bridge of Spirits Review (FlyingMonkey)
Love the aesthetic, but the gameplay could use a lot of work.
Aesthetically, this game is great. The graphics, music, and sounds all come together well, though the Pixar style felt a bit out of place in a video game at first. The rot and their hats are adorable and every one of them gets 5 stars. If this were simply an art game, it would be excellent. Unfortunately, it also includes combat, puzzles, and platforming.
The combat generally feels very easy, but still managed to be frustrating. Enemies hit you while you're behind them. Flying enemies can't be hit because they're barely above the hitbox of your weapon. When trying to unlock the camera from an enemy, it would often just change targets instead. The bow doesn't lock on to locked-on enemies, making it next to useless in combat. These are all problems the game industry as a whole solved a long time ago.
Most of the puzzles are either childishly easy or completely unintuitive. I solved multiple puzzles on accident while just trying to get a feel for them. At least once, I had a piece left over that wasn't actually part of the solution. Imagine if a jigsaw puzzle had leftover pieces after you were done with it... Puzzle elements often lack feedback or give the wrong feedback, giving you no way of knowing if you're on the right track or not. I wasted a lot of time standing on buttons that lit up, slid down into place, and did absolutely nothing. One puzzle spawned enemies as a "punishment" for doing something in the wrong order, and in a game where fighting enemies to destroy corruption is a common theme, that "punishment" just feels like you must be on the right track.
The controls and movement are.... okay. The inability to save myself from falling off a ledge unless that ledge happens to be clearly marked became frustrating pretty quickly given how frequently platforming came up. The controls were often inconsistent. Sometimes I could shoot arrows while sliding, sometimes I couldn't, despite no clear difference in what I was doing. Swimming feels like an afterthought, but comes up often enough that it really shouldn't. Other than that, it's fine.
Ember Labs, please either take a course in game design or stick to making commercials. This had a lot of potential.