When Ace Team released Zeno Clash in 2009, we had one of the rare examples of a first person game that focused on melee combat as opposed to shooting. Backed up with an amazing visual style and story, the game became somewhat of a cult hit. After several years and Ace’s next unusual game Rock of Ages, we finally got a sequel released last year.
While Zeno Clash 2 aimed to make things bigger, the developers kind of missed the one area that was most important: The combat system.
Father, Mother, Sister, Brother:
The story of Zeno Clash 2 starts pretty much after the end of the first game. And if you’re like me and can’t remember that, the game’s tutorial also acts as a prologue. Our hero from the first game, Gnat decides to fight against a creature called Golem who guided him to fight and lock up his parent, the hermaphrodite creature known as Father-Mother. Who we learned in the last game went around stealing children and raising them as its own.
If the story wasn’t weird enough, Zeno Clash 2 continues the series unique art style with a world that looks like a fever dream after watching The Muppet Show. The developers have expanded things with the game no longer taking place across set levels, but now an open world. Quest markers guide you to where you need to go along with side quests that you can do.
Unlike the first game, you can now level Gnat up by finding level up totems hidden around the world, along with collectible butterflies and other items for achievement purposes.
The combat system has been tweaked a bit to prevent some of the more game breaking moves from happening. You now have a special move bar and a stamina bar to keep track of during combat. Missing, hitting a guarded enemy and general attacks will drain the stamina bar. When it runs out, you’ll be unable to attack or defend until it recharges.
The visual style for the world…
Attacking enemies will fill the special move bar which you an expend some of it for stronger attacks or drain it for a few seconds of enhanced damage.
The developers have removed the charge attacks from the previous game as it was just game breakingly powerful to perform over and over again.
Defense is still based around either blocking or dodging. Hitting the space bar will make Ghat block and timing it before impact will let him redirect the attack and open up a counterattack move. Dodging requires you to move either left or right while blocking and is a lot harder to pull off. Getting it right will set up the enemy for an even stronger counterattack.
While the game is all about first person hand to hand combat, you can still find guns and other weapons in the world. These weapons do a lot of damage but are limited by ammo and durability. And while their use does break up the combat, you’ll still be relying on your fists for the most part.
Overall Zeno Clash 2 fulfills the role of a sequel by providing more than the previous. However, all this new content comes at a cost of the game not feeling as refined compared to the first one.
Punched In the Face:
The problem with Zeno Clash 2 is that all the new content leaves the game feeling unfocused and for lack of a better term, clashes with what’s carried over from the first game.
While the bigger levels do show off more of the great art style, they don’t serve any higher gameplay purpose other than giving space for the developers to hide the collectibles. Since your only interaction with the world is picking items up or fighting, all this art design and environment are wasted.
Despite the level size, you’re still just moving through corridors. Zeno Clash 2 falls into the classic FPS trap of invisible walls and boundary points and how there is very little that you can actually visit.
… Is just as offbeat as the creatures you meet.
Tying improving Gnat to collectible hunting in this way feels more arbitrary than a good decision. Since the primary mechanics of Zeno Clash revolve around combat, to not be rewarded for playing the game that way doesn’t make sense.
Moving onto combat, the developers have increased the number of enemies you’ll fight in a single battle, but haven’t done much to improve the actual mechanics. You can only focus on one enemy at a time and there aren’t any advanced moves from what I could see that allowed you to transition from one enemy to another.
Instead, enemy groups tend to bunch up together and it becomes hard to fight one enemy without getting into attack range of the others. This is where a new feature of the game comes in: Allowing you to summon allies to fight. Again this doesn’t feel that well thought out, from what I could see; you could only take your partner who is a part of the co-op mode and one additional ally.
You can only recruit someone if your leadership stat is high enough, but other than the arbitrary leadership rank, I couldn’t see a reason why one person was better or worse than another.
I really wanted to see more moves added to combat or even location based damage beyond just punching a face to do more damage. Speaking of location, the depth of field continues to be a problem in Zeno Clash 2 as it’s hard to tell if you are in range of an enemy or if your attack is going to whiff.
Another part of combat is the special moves which are tied to performing combos. However, the combo system is somewhat broken by the fact that it only counts completed chains from a single hand. So let’s say I do L punch, L punch, L punch, that would be a combo and build the special meter. But if I do L punch, R punch, L punch, R punch, even though that would flow better it would not count as a combo and not build the meter. This made the combat system even more simplistic.
Fights are on a larger scale, but your actual combat moves have not been enhanced to compensate.
I also found defense harder than in the previous game, as every enemy species had a different attack animation, making it hard to gauge when to block. More often, just stringing strong punches together was the safer alternative.
Zeno Clash 2 tries to be many things: Open world exploration, unique story, visual design and first person fighting. But instead of doing one thing really well, we have several done just okay. It seemed like Ace Team wanted to go bigger but in the process forget to really spend time developing the combat system out.
Leaving us with an amazing world… that we’re only allowed to punch people in the face as our means of exploration.
