Publisher: ACE Team
Developer: ACE Team
System requirements: Windows XP/Vista/Vista64, Intel Pentium 4 3.0 GHz, 1 GB RAM, at least 3 GB of free hard drive space, 128 MB video card with shader model 2.0 (ATI 9600, NVidia 6600 or better), DirectX 9.0c compatible sound card, DirectX 9.0c or DirectX 10 (Vista)
Genre: FPS
Release date: Available now

Games focusing on unarmed combat have been one of the staples of the video-game industry since the days of Mike Tyson’s Punchout!! and the original Street Fighter. While the gimmicks mutate over time, such games are invested in giving players an up-close and personal kind of experience, one that mimics the bare-knuckle brawls found in movies. I was thus a bit skeptical about Zeno Clash’s claims to uniqueness. Upon playing, I discovered bizarre settings and a narrative with a central mystery featuring a rough and dirty string of what are essentially gang fights. It’s certainly a surprising combination.

Zeno Clash bills itself as a first-person shooter/fighting game. This description is for the most part accurate. While there is a variety of firearms available for use (including shotguns, pistols and a grenade launcher), all of them suffer from a combination of small magazine capacity, low damage and lengthy reload times. As a result, the unarmed combat remains the central feature of this game. Eschewing fancy martial arts in favor of visceral brawling, Zeno Clash provides players with plenty of opportunities to smash the faces of stunned enemies, ram elbows into their ribs and kick them when they’re down, preventing them from getting back up. There are no rounds, no rules, and the only fancy combination moves are self-invented ways of getting the most out of your opponents’ failures to properly block and dodge your attacks.

Set in a fictional place called Zenozoik, Zeno Clash follows the story of Ghat as he tries to escape the vengeance of his former family. Ghat has killed his Father-Mother, and your job is to find out why. Half told in flashbacks, the narrative follows him as he tries to escape Halstedom, only to return and settle accounts with his former family and discover its secret. The setting and its visual presentation are a cross between an animated Tim Burton film and an episode of the original “Twilight Zone.” Its inhabitants are only vaguely humanoid, while the architecture and natural world are in some cases grotesque. The farther Ghat gets from Halstedom, the stranger things become, culminating in his meeting Golem, a creature with the ability to end Ghat’s conflict with his family. Such a setting makes things a tad interesting, as you never know quite what to expect. It also allows the designers to indulge their artistic fancies in ways that would be more difficult in a more conventional setting.

While you might expect a game of this kind to be completely linear, and indeed it is, I have to praise the developers for not setting themselves on auto-pilot in designing the various battlefields and encounters. All of the areas in which combat takes place are unique and require significant situational awareness on the part of the player. Not only are there health power-ups to be found tucked away in odd corners, but also the terrain can lend itself to different fighting styles. The AI also strives to be aware of its surroundings; clever players will hear armed AI opponents screaming at their comrades to get out of the way when combat takes place in tight corners. And while there are bosses to fight who are more difficult than regular opponents, I found that the levels are paced in such a way that I never sat back and said to myself, “Okay, now a boss will come out and then the level will be over.”

While I found the odd setting entertaining and the fighting to be engaging, I felt that Zeno Clash was lacking in certain respects. First and foremost, the interface’s auto-lock feature really needs to be made optional. It essentially locks your first-person perspective onto the selected target, so that no matter how you move or what you do, you can’t lose sight of it. This is useful in some situations, but almost every fight involves multiple opponents and the need to remain aware of your environment. As a result, I found myself inconveniently locked on a target in situations in which I wanted to remain free to look in any direction, especially when I wanted to throw a punch at one target followed by a swift kick to the groin of another. While a keystroke unlocks the target, such an action takes up precious milliseconds in a game in which timing attacks and blocks is everything. Another annoying feature involves certain enemies who seem to come back from the dead with absurd frequency. The Hunter is a prime example. It’s not too much of a spoiler to say that you will kill him two times with firearms and he’ll keep returning for more. Even more bizarre, at one point your companion Deadra says she’ll stand near his corpse and cover it with a weapon to keep him from coming back from the dead, only to have him show up in five minutes to try and kill you again. While I understand this is not a full-priced game, it’s simply unacceptable to recycle villains to this degree.

Also included with Zeno Clash are Tower Challenges, skirmish encounters in which you face off against a set of specific opponents, defeat them, and then move up to the next level of the tower. Such a gameplay mode gives those who enjoy the fighting, like myself, plenty of extra time to beat their opponents senseless. This, coupled with the story and the artwork, all combine to make a solid game, despite my few complaints. Priced at a modest $14.99 on Steam, Zeno Clash is an excellent independent offering. If you are looking for a fighting game with interesting quirks, take a look at my video review and then pick up a copy.

Our Score :
Our Recommendation: