GregHowley.com

I've defeated 14 of the 16 Colossi in this game, and am ready to write a review. Before I begin, let me preface the review with the fact that I really did enjoy the game. Yes, I will pick on the more annoying aspects, but despite these things, Shadow of the Colossus was a really good game.

Shadow of the Colossus is the tale of an epic struggle between a simple man and the camera angle. Seriously though, controlling the camera is one of the game's greatest challenges. I'll get to that in a minute. First the intro. The story can be a bit hard to follow, but it amounts to this: your character rides into an ancient temple at the outset of the story carrying the corpse of his dead lover. A powerful spirit/diety/demon who resides here has the power to return her to life, but before he'll do that, he requests of you a favor. He would have you destroy the sixteen statues that line the halls of this room. In order to destroy each, you must vanquish a colossus. And so the game amounts to sixteen epic and increasingly difficult boss fights.

The challenge of defeating each colossus amounts to first locating the thing (which for the last few is very difficult!) and then finding out how to fight it. Finding the colossi is accomplished by holding aloft your magic sword while standing in the sunlight. The sword will reflect a beam which points towards the next colossus you must fight. Sounds like a straight ticket to the goal, but after the first few, the path isn't direct. Although you'll know which direction the thing lies in, your path to get to it might require you to go in an entirely different direction. And often, the paths go through dark valleys or forests where you'll have no sunlight, and therefore no magic compass-sword.

You have to climb a cliff to get to the first colossus, but the path is direct. And the first thing you'll think when you see it is wow. That sucker is big. You'll probably stand there gawking at it while it bears down on you, then come to your senses and run up to try to climb it. Well, the problem is that when it steps, it breaks the ground under its feet and sends rubble shrapnel flying all over, as well as a big cloud of dust that makes it a bit tough to see. You find yourself thinking Aaaargh!! as you play, which is a good and proper effect for the game to achieve. The game is very cinematic, and that's one of the things I like most about it.

You don't run around buying new equipment and leveling up in this game. You start with a sword and a bow, and that is your only equipment throughout the game. In fact, the only character upgrades to be had are ones I didn't even know were there until after I'd beat the first few colossi. You can find various trees and shoot arrows at their fruit, which will then fall for you to pick up. The fruit increases your life meter. There are also lizards running around in the game, and if you find one with a white stripe and manage to shoot it (which isn't always easy) it will increase your grip meter, which is handy when you're hanging atop an eighty foot colossus who's trying desperately to shake you off.

Aside from the colossi and the devilish camera angle, your greatest foe in this game is your horse. Your horse is an integral part of the game - he allows you to travel much more quickly, and is actually essential to beating a number of colossi, but when you finally line up a perfect shot at that lizard you've been chasing for 20 minutes and your horse immediately rides up and stops directly between you and it, you'll begin to feel a bit of what I'm feeling. The horse actually killed me more times than colossi did. If you ride up to a cliff, the horse will instinctually stop - it's impossible to make the horse ride over a cliff. But if you then dismount, your character will often decide to dismount on the cliff side rather than on the safe side, and you then plummet to your death. It was funny the first time. The horse can also be difficult to steer at times. To steer, you actually pull on the reins, which is nice because it's realistic. But precision control is not easy. Getting the horse to ride down that narrow path is tough, and often the horse will react to a two foot mound the same way it would to a bottomless pit. At least the horse only pushed me over a cliff once.

As I mentioned, the greatest challenge in the game is controlling the camera. I can't count the number of times that a colossus the size of a small skyscraper was bearing down on me in an open field, and I couldn't seem to find it anywhere. And it got exponentially worse if I went indoors. Inside a cave or next to a cliff face, the camera will actually smack into the obstacle as it pivots around your character, preventing you from seeing what's directly in front of you. There were even times when my character would go off-screen and I couldn't see where I was at all. Another of the more difficult and aggrivating camera scenarios is when the camera slowly pivots as you run. This means that the direction you need to move the joystick in order to keep running in the same direction changes. When you're running across a narrow bridge, this sucks.

But all-in-all, it is a very good game. I did have to consult GameSpot's Game Guide a couple times, most notably for when I couldn't find a certain colossus anywhere, but only had to look up how to beat them three times. (#2,#4, and #11) For example, number two is the four-legged ox-looking one, and unlike the first one, he had no climbable surfaces I could reach. So I spent about an hour running around looking for surfaces off of which I could jump to land on its back or head. I never even came close. I'm glad I looked at the guide, because the solution was to shoot the thing with an arrow on the bottom of its foot. Then it stumbles and you can climb it. Now, that's probably something I could've figured out if this one had occurred later on, but I didn't yet know that I could shine the light from my sword on a colossus to find weak spots (not vital spots, which are where you stab to kill it) or that those shiny things I could barely see on its feet when it walked actually meant something.

But mostly, I was able to figure things out, although the eleventh colossus was something I'd never have guessed in a hundred years. And I've still got number fifteen and number sixteen to go. Overall, I do recommend the game - it's a lot of fun.