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| | Title:
Shadow Of The Colossus
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System:
Playstation 2
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Genre:
3rd Person Action
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Publisher:
Sony
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Developer:
N/A
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Release:
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Online:
No
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ESRB:
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Like movies it’s hard to come across a new idea in video games. It seems like every single idea has been attempted and that the market is in need of a new idea or approach. These types of games don’t come along very often, but when they do it’s a much needed breath of fresh air. Shadow Of The Colossus is one of these breaths of fresh air. The same people who brought us the brilliant Ico are building SOTC for the PS2. Even though Ico did not sell very well, those who experienced it say it’s one of the best games in the Playstation 2’s library. Let’s hope that same level of quality is being put into SOTC. Early impressions say yes, if not even more.
Shadow Of The Colossus takes place in a mythical world where large roaming beasts, which we will call Colossuses, live. You the player take the role of a young male soldier who has lost the love of his life. He takes her to a temple and sets off on a quest to kill all the Colossuses who lives in his world. If he kills them all the girl he loves will come back to life. This is the main driving force throughout the entire game, to bring back this girl. The young male will have to travel across a vast world in search of these beasts with only his horse and feet as his way of transportation. The horse is said to be one of the truly unique aspects of SOTC, promising to utilize a horse like never before in a videogame. Various screenshots and trailers have shown the young solider on intense chases with his horse.
In a truly clever design choice, there will only be boss fights in Shadow Of The Colossus. No smaller enemies, no minions, just the huge hulking Colossuses inhabiting the world. The real drive of the gameplay in SOTC is not only fighting these Colossuses but also attempting to find them. The world of SOTC is said to be huge, and trying to transverse and locate the Colossuses will be one of the biggest challenges in the game. Puzzles will obviously be a big part of this game, probably using the horse as well. To some gamers this may sound boring but with such a lush and beautiful environment to explore I doubt anyone will be unimpressed or bored. The big gameplay mechanic besides the horse though is the young soldiers sword. It acts almost like a compass. Hold the sword up and a beam of light will appear showing the direction of the Colossus that must be killed. But that’s all the player gets, just a direction and must find their way there.
Once a Colossus is found the difficult task of taking it down becomes the top priority. SOTC takes a unique approach to this in that each Colossus must be taken down in a specific way. Fighting one does not involve just running up and swinging the sword madly. These are huge walking tanks of creatures, some of them being three to four stories in height. What each one has though is a weak point, somewhere on their body that must be hit several times in order to bring them down. This weak point can be found the exact same way the Colossus is found, the sword. A small glowing area will appear on the Colossus if the sword is held up. To get to the weak point requires one of the most interesting parts of the game, the player must climb up to the weak point. That’s right you have to climb up the Colossus, and it knows you’re there. How it tries to get you off it’s back and how the climbing actually plays out has not bee revealed. As you can tell taking down one of these Colossuses is a huge ordeal.
Not much has been talked up about the world except that it is enormous. From trailers though it looks to take some of its characteristics from Lord of The Rings with some of the more majestic landscapes seen in recent games. The ending of one trailer found the young solider riding his horse up to a cut in the cliff. He emerged on the other side to see a long bridge before him with no railing, but that stretched from where he stood to as far as the eye could see and was about several hundred feet in the air. The bridge was made of stone and seemed to lead to a large temple in the distance. Besides the great design, weather also seems to be a built in factor. At one point during the game the solider was sitting on his horse underneath a small outcropping of rock, avoiding the downpour of rain. Forests, old temples, swamps, plains, and majestic vistas are just some of the locations to be found in Shadow Of The Colossus.
Honestly, this game looks to be amazing. The lack of enemies save the Colossuses may be a weird design choice but when you see how involved, searching, finding the weak point and then actually getting to the weak point is when it comes to a Colossus the game doesn’t slouch on content. Look for this game on the PS2 sometime this fall.
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Cloud890
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