Game: Zeno Clash 2 Developer: ACE Team Genre: Beat’em-up/Fighting Game, First-Person-Shooter Releases: 2013 (Playstation 3, Windows, Xbox 360) Stalk’s Rating: 5/10 Weirdness has come home. We are back in Zenozoic, the lands of strange and quite frankly fucked up shit in “Zeno Clash 2”, the strange first-person brawler from ACE Team. I tried to play this game in the past but for some reason it wouldn’t start. And then, when I thought that I had the time to look into what exactly the problem might be, it started with no problems whatsoever, which I deemed to be the perfect time to play through stint of hitting ugly critters in the face. The game has a co-op mode for anyone interested to play it with a friend, however I played the game solo which is perfectly possible and certainly causes less confusion overall; because the game will add enough bodies to the battle to make things weird often enough. Here is my opinion on the second installment of the “Zeno Clash” series: The story of “Zeno Clash 2” continues shortly after the events of the first game. Just as a refresher, the community simply referred to as the “family” lived in a city called Halstedom. Their leader was a bird-like person by the name of Father-Mother, a name that stems from this being serving as the single parent to all the people of the family; hence the name. You play as Ghat, who back in the first installment had to flee Halstedom after people thought that he had killed Father-Mother; which turned out to be untrue. What Ghat did realize over the course of his journey to the end of the world is that Father-Mother actually abducted all their children from their real parents when they were babies, which explains the wide variety of species milling around in the city. Together with the moral support of a golem that he finds at the end of his journey and the help of his female companion Deadra, he manages to face Father-Mother in a final duel, after which the bird person had to face the consequences of their actions. The Golem showcases the D&D alignment differences between his Lawful Neutral and the rest of the world’s Chaotic Neutral rather splendidly. Ghat is not in any better position than he was at the start of the first game, because there are plenty of people hating him for bringing the aforementioned golem to the city of Halstedom. Seeing as the inhabitants are far beneath his status and intellect, he tries to help them form a society worth living in; starting with the introduction of a law system that sees Father-Mother being punished with a prison sentence. Ghat, overall being tired of being seen as some minion of the golem, decides to go rogue; and has the support of ex-opponent Rimad, one of the few core members of the family still being around. As part of the understanding of justice, the golem used its knowledge to tell the people where their real parents are, which scattered the family across the winds. However, while breaking Father-Mother out of prison as an act of defiance is one thing, getting control over Halstedom back into the hands of the family is a totally different challenge. To fight the Golem and bring relative peace back to the city, Ghat and Rimad are on their way to find loyal family members that are willing to help Father-Mother get their place as leader back even with all that has happened in the past. The story develops further than that, even though the delivery is quite clumsy. The Golem is a truly lawful character, putting his own believes and desires behind the system of laws that was given to him by his makers. The reason for this is revealed over the course of playing “Zeno Clash 2”, since the Zenozoik, the world of “Zeno Clash 2”, is actually not the only place on Earth that people live in. In fact, there seem to be civilized communities outside of Xenozoik everywhere, but the keyword here is civilized: Those people decided to ostracize the uncultured and uncivilized brutes living in Zenozoik until they actually manage to become acceptable in broader society; and the Golem really just wants to speed things up by bringing law and order to the otherwise very much tooth-and-nail-based community of Halstedom. Now, Rimat really just tags along because she sees Father-Mother as their parent figure, but why exactly Ghat hates this idea of having the Golem bring societal norms to his world is anyone’s guess. It seems second nature to him to fight people, with his brief stint as one of the Corvid, crazy hermits with their own unique hyperfixations, being that he simply kicked the arse of anyone in his way and decides to rob them of parts of their armor as trophies. “Zeno Clash 2” obviously still uses the same, weird world of Zenozoic, which is a plus for the game as a whole. I have read a review in which someone described the world-building of “Zeno Clash” as asking Salvador Dali to re-create “The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind”, which is a fitting description since it definitely captures the completely alien nature of the place you wander through. But while the world is definitely the same, the way we wander through it isn’t. You see, “Zeno Clash 2” is not a linear series of set-pieces anymore, but rather an open-world game, which is not ideal for reasons that will become obvious rather soon. For one, finding the next objective is pretty complicated and the objective markers do not always help you find what you are searching for; and they occasionally vanish for no good reason to add to the confusion. And in other games were you can go wherever you want, you normally get something for your troubles in form of loot or experience. Well, not in “Zeno Clash 2”: Levels up are triggered by finding totems in seemingly random spots, while there is really nothing loot-able in the game whatsoever, with melee weapons breaking quickly, firearms being useless once they are empty, and healing items only helping in the situation you find them since you have no inventory. To be fair, “Zeno Clash” was never about finding some good gear, so this criticism might seem somewhat weird. The first game was about hitting ugly and strange monsters, most of them humanoid, in the face while avoiding to be clobbered to a pulp yourself. And “Zeno Clash 2” delivers on the combat part again: The left and right mouse button use the respective hand on screen, with tapping the mouse key triggering a small jab, while holding and releasing it gives you a strong attack that can stagger opponents or even send them flying. There are running attacks, grabs which unlock a bunch of different follow-ups, and with the addition of a yellow gauge that is used for special attacks you even have a sort of panic button at your disposal. There are also defensive options, with holding Space Bar for blocking attacks, while pressing the run button while blocking resulting in a quick dash to get out of harm’s way. All of this sounds good and the tutorial does a good job giving you an idea of what options you can use in battle; and then the actual fighting happens. You see, in “Zeno Clash 2”, much like in its predecessor, you never fight 1 vs 1 battles but have to dodge the attacks of three or more enemies constantly. Going for big flashy combos is therefore terribly risky, because at any point of you dominating one guy in melee, there might be his buddy coming from the side and kicking your head in. The game gives you a sort of instinctive attack option that whacks an opponent in your blind spot and turns you in their direction, but needless to say “Zeno Clash 2” does not really want you to spend lots of time on just one enemy. My way to victory was a combination of the one-two-one-two punch combo that you can do by stringing punches together, which might be not as flashy and also does not deal as much damage as some other attacks, but is pretty safe because I can just abandon the combo in the middle if necessary while also asking for pretty much no stamina whatsoever. This is one more thing that you need to be aware of, since constantly striking big will eventually color your screen grey and causes Ghat to pant, a sign of a depleted stamina bar and therefore the perfect moment to back off. On the defensive side, your best friend is movement. Sure, you can block or dodge, but in most cases you do not even have to commit to such options. Enemies, no matter what size of group they are in, will slowly shuffle towards you in some battle-ready stance, while Ghat has way more movement speed than them while running. So, run circles around the enemies and try to position them in some sort of line, which causes the front-most enemy to block the next guy from attacking while occasionally hitting his buddy for friendly fire. Since you can use allies this also applies to your team, but in most cases I went solo since your companions are not exactly capable and recruiting any worthwhile allies requires you to level a specific stat, which in turn means less health, stamina, and damage output. What does work though are the occasional weapons you can find, which you should use whenever possible since they do insane damage. If an opponent has a firearm, he is going to annoy you anyway, so run up to him, give him a swing, and then snatch his weapon from the ground to cause havoc. The Stone Age weaponry might seem crude or sometimes even illogical, but when a pre-historic shotgun downs an opponent in two shots without them having enough time to get up between shots I can make my life in battle a whole lot easier; and once empty, they can still be thrown as a make-shift projectile. The battle system works alright, even if I actively decided against using a sizeable amount of options since they weren’t worth it in my opinion. However, what I cannot get over is the story and the characters. The original “Zeno Clash” was weird, but at least the entire Father-Mother situation presented a problem for Ghat as a protagonist. In “Zeno Clash 2”, Ghat really just seems to have a problem with authority and rebels against any notion of control by hitting it in the face. It does not help that the female side-kick in form of Rimat is really just there to either mention how important Father-Mother is while complaining about pretty much anything for the rest of the time, which stands in stark contrast with the rather calm Daedra from the first game. I constantly feel like I am wandering from one objective to the next without really knowing why that place is suddenly important, because the idea of finding the “children” of Father-Mother is thrown to the wayside for the random thought of finding something against the Golem in his “house”. There is one beam of light in the story at the 95% mark when the South Golem is introduced, who happens to see things rather differently from the Golem that is currently in control of Halstedom. Unfortunately, he becomes a weird antagonist for the last fifteen minutes of the game, constantly wanting to test everyone around him to see their worthiness but without any gravity to anything he says. This leads to a rather unexciting end boss battle, after which nothing has been gained and no conclusion is drawn, which is honestly pretty unfulfilling in my opinion. Unfulfilling is also basically what “Zeno Clash 2” as a whole feels like, with the changes the developer made to the formula being worse for the game series overall and the story-telling being a rather messy affair, that is also marked by some pretty bad voice acting occasionally. All in all, “Zeno Clash 2” was a game that I finished, which is more than I can say about some of the other pearls I played over the last few months, but I certainly could have been better. If you want a melee-combat-heavy game in a strange world in first-person-view, just play the original “Zeno Clash”.