Every kid dreamt of being in a Disney movie. If you’re sitting there thinking, “I didn’t,” I’ve got news for you - you did. Disney owns everything. Did you want to be in 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Star Wars? That’s a Disney movie. Be like Iron Man? That’s a Disney movie. Maybe you wanted to be like Jack Bauer - newsflash, thanks to the Fox acquisition, Mr. 24 is now officially a Disney character. 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Kena: Bridge of Spirits fulfills that childhood wish, capturing the bouncy charm of Disney inside a wonderfully lush and realised world. Of all the Disney films out there, it feels most like 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Raya and the Last Dragon, so unl🍬ess you’re a child right now, it probably isn’t the exact movie you dreamed about, but it’s close enough.
Kena feels like Raya, but it feels like a lot of other things too. Zelda, Horizon, Princess Mononoke, and 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Ghost of Tsushima all came to mind during my playthrough. Other people who’ve played it here have compared it to Jedi: Fallen Order, Ori, and Dark Souls (not for the difficulty, don’t worry), and The Medium. While I d🐓on’t agree with all of them, I think everyone who plays this game will add a new comparison to the pile. That’s because Kena borrows extensively from games that already exist, but doesn’t do a lot to help itself stand out.
Last year, Ghost of Tsushima won the audience choice for Game of the Year at The Game Awards. Personally, I didn’t get it. I thought it was 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:a very good, very safe game. Kena is the same. It has a vast array of meaningless collectibles, a repetitive map, combat that doesn’t feel worthwhile until the end, and the whisperings of a story about something more substantial than it actually is. There’s no historically inaccurate appropriation of Japanese culture, but everything else feels very Tsushima-y. Yet while those repetitive tasks annoyed me in Tsushima, I had no issues with them here. Maybe it’s because Kena is substantially shorter - 15 hours is easily enough to clear the main story - but it’s also because the game is so damn loveable. It’s well polished and while the graphics aren&rsquo♛;t cutting edge, the soft, rounded artstyle is perfectly placed to capture the inherent warmth at the centre of it all.
In 2010, this would have been a GOTY contender. It does everything it tries to do very competently, and it makes you happy while it does so. To say its game design ideas are dated wouldn’t be fair - they still hold up, and nothing feels archaic or off-putting. But with Kena only being able to climb in areas clearly marked with white paint, the open-world being a mixture of smaller hubs mashed together, combat with no attack cancel, supporting characters with no other development what🔥soever, and very basic traversal, it feels like Kena is occupying a space in the genre that has long been left behind.
Apart from the graphics, which would obviously have been groundbreaking a decade ago, all of Kena’s conventions have since been built upon and improved. Playing Kena, they all combine well enough, but it’s nothing you haven’t played before. Maybe that’s not too terrible. We haven’t compared Kena to Tomb Raider yet, so sure, it’s a Disney Lara Croft. My favourite 168澳洲幸运5开奖网:Tomb Raider is 2006’s Legend. Kena does exploration and traversal better than Legend - just because it’s not cutting ed🦂ge doesn’t mean it’s awful. Loads of games from the era Kena seems to belong to still hold up. It&rsqꦅuo;s just that ten years ago, Kena would have been great. By the standards of today, it’s just quite good.
If you’re excited 🦩for Kena, then you’ll probably love it. All of the fluffy, adorable whimsy of the trailers is present - the action is light, the adventuring feels epic, and the Rot, while given too little time on screen and too little importance in the narrative, are perfect mascots. If you’re on the fence though, it’s pretty much everything you expected it to be based on the v💎ery first trailer. Nothing more, nothing less.
Kena has three different main quests, all of which involve freeing a spirit from corruption. The puzzles grow tougher as you progress , but it’s basically the same quest, three times. You wander. You fight stuff. You win. It’s fine. Hell, I enjoyed it. But for a game all about spirits and the afterlife, it doesn’t feel like it does much with the premise. It’s Raya and the Last Dragon, but it’s lacking the Heart - you know, like in the movie? What do you mean you haven’t seen it? 🉐Why didn’t you say that earlier? Anyway, the story is littl♔e more than a few wooden sticks dug into the dirt to keep the game propped up. It’s just a basic plot so Kena has something to do. It exists specifically for you, the player, to play through, rather than as an actual story we’re supposed to become invested in.
The combat is worth sticking with, I’ll say that in its defence. Initially, you have your staff, and that’s about it. Heavy attack, light attack, dodge, block. There’s a parry function, but you probably won’t use it that much. Soon enough you unlock the bow, then later, the bombs, and finally, a dash attack. You can upgrade these too, adding Rot charges to them for mor💙e power, combining them with sprint moves, upgrading your quiver, et cetera. It takes a long time for you to have Kena’s full arsenal at your disposal, but when you do, combat feels rich and rewarding, especially with the enemies growing more complex alongside your attacks.
For example, the bomb doesn’t just do extra damage, there are specific enemies who need to be hit with a bomb⛄ to expose their weak points. Combat is the only thing in Kena that feels fresh in 2021, and it’s tied unnecessarily rigidly to progre🍌ssion, meaning the game is almost over before you’ve seen the best of it.
Kena: Bridge of Spirits is a very good game that feels like it’s already be𝓀en left behind by modern genre conventions. There’s nothing all that frustrating in that - we shouldn’t expect games, especially those made by studios the size of Ember Labs, to be constantly groundbreaking, but so much of Kena feels borrowed from elsewhere that it’s difficult to call it great. It’s a solid, enjoyable experience, and charming enough t💧hat you won’t care that you’ve played versions of it before. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel, but it’s a pretty nice wheel nonetheless.
Score: 4/5. A PS5 review code was provided by the publisher.