
Players are so used to searching every square inch of a game's world for treasure and enemies that they end up missing the forest for the trees. It's just water meeting gravity in one the world's most beautiful natural phenomena. It's not a place to hide from pursuing helicopters, it's not concealing the entrance to the final dungeon. In Shadow, a waterfall is just a waterfall. Question 2: Can getting there be half the fun? There's no hack and slash drudgery here, no blasting through armies of clones- Shadow offers sixteen epic conflicts between a tiny man and an overwhelming force, each one more intense than the last. The vast differences between the Colossi's designs and the environments they're fought in ensures that no two battles are the same. Fourteen of the sixteen Colossi are as much mountain as beast, and must be combated by scaling their bodies and finding sensitive areas to skewer with a magical blade. The game consists entirely of what would normally be called 'Boss Fights', although that title doesn't really apply since there aren't any regular monsters to compare them to. Taking on the role of a nameless hero, players are asked to slay 16 Colossi, and absolutely nothing else. Shadow of the Colossus forgoes this practice entirely. Unless the developers manage to make the specific methods of murder incredibly entertaining, this invariably leads to gameplay that gets tiresome before the game ends. Since game developers can't be expected to design five or six hundred individual enemies, action games usually boil down to killing the same handful of people over and over again.


Shooting, slashing, or just beating people to death, it's rare for the body count in an action game to be under three digits, and not uncommon for them to be in the fours.
#Shadow of the colossus ps2 reviews serial#
The worst serial killers in history killed far fewer people than the average video game hero. Question 1: Do we need to endlessly slaughter cannon fodder? Shadow asks big questions about game design, and suggests changes to the way we approach videogames. To the casual player it may seem like nothing more than just another exceptionally beautiful third-person climbing and stabbing simulator, but to gamers who have been playing for their entire lives it's something grander and more significant. Shadow of the Colossus is a videogame for people who love videogames.
