Monkey Business

Getting to the most important part first, Dice has done an absolutely amazing job in bringing platforming to the first person perspective. It also becomes very intuitive and players will find that they get better as they play more.

The left trigger and bumper are used for “up” and “down”. Up leads to jumps, wall running and climbing. Down leads to crouching and sliding. The right bumper is used for turning 180 degrees; this mainly helps in jumping to a higher platform following a wall climb or to quickly turn away when run into a guard. Combinations of these are then used to pull of manoeuvres.

The game really shines when Faith (player) picks up speed and gains momentum to move and jump faster and you can almost feel the cool breeze going against you when you pick up real speed.

The game pits you either outdoor or indoors. Outdoors is where most of the game takes place and is the ideal environment to pick up good speed. The story mode places you in three different game modes: (1) Either you are being chased by the law and have a variety of options to avoid them (2) You are chasing someone (3) when not being chased or chasing someone, this is where it gets a little trickier and you have to look out for platforms and find ways to get your destination.

Combat

Faith can punch and kick using the right trigger. This is combined with the left trigger and bumper to land different types of blows. Although this gets you through most of the game, it’s very inconvenient towards the end when you have multiple enemies gunning you down in machine guns.

Your other choice is to disarm an opponent. When disarming, the opponent is also knocked out. Unfortunately this is a really hard thing to do as the time interval to perform a disarm is very small and I always had to slow down time to perform a disarm.

As mentioned earlier, towards the end of the game players will face multiple enemies with machine guns with it being impossible to run away without taking them down. Unfortunately this leads to players having to disarm opponents and then using the gun to kill all other guards. This could lead to a lot of deaths, even if you perform everything perfectly, in trying to disarm disarm a guard. It feels these situations have some form of luck in them as Faith can not take a lot damage and can easily die before even reaching a guard. By forcing people into combat the game takes players away from the game's strengths as even the gun play is not that much fun.

This game could have really used the rewind system from Prince of Persia. This is because often I found when trying to keep up with momentum I would mis-time a jump by a little bit which led to my death several times. Death is a big slow down and sort of stops the fun. In addition the out door environment is quite open ended. This means that when running from the law often you will not know where to go and one wrong turn leads to your death.

Short Lived

The story mode can be easily completed in 5 to 6 hours. Once the story is complete players have the option of playing it on harder difficulty which only makes the combat harder. Seeing how annoying combat already is, I don’t see why people would want do that. The other option is to run time trials and best times. Unfortunately with limited maps there is only so many times players will do this and so it wears out thin.

The design in the game is not very complex. All of the out door environments are mainly white. The indoors are nothing special either. Comparing it to Portal, I don’t see why this game should have been at full retail. It is probably because EA spent a lot of money on advertising and drawing the anime which is not even that good. Perhaps had they included a “make your own map” the game would have had its length increased.

Story

The story in the game is not very strong. All it does is that it gives players a reason to run and jump around, and that is good enough. But if you must know, you play the role of Faith a runner. The government has put strong restrictions on society especially in the transfer of information. Therefore runners are used to transfer information and packages to different people. In the process Faith’s sister gets framed for murder and she tries to help her out.

Final Word: They have done an astounding job bringing platforming to the first person’s perspective. However they shoot themselves in the foot by forcing players to engage in combat later on in the game. Because platforming is the only main attraction, the game lacks depth. In addition the game is far too short to be recommended anything other than a rent.