Kena: Spirit Bridge Review

It makes sense that Ember Lab, the developer of Kena: Bridge of Spirits, started out as an animation studio. Just look at this gorgeous world and the Pixar style character designs to tell you that this is a team that has a ton of experience creating amazing digital artwork, including their fan movie. from Majora’s Mask, Terrible Fate. While Bridge of Spirits’ gameplay doesn’t quite match the extraordinarily high bar set by its visuals for a number of reasons, including bland storytelling and shallow progression, this open-world 3D action-adventure does. still remains an impressive achievement thanks to its exciting and deceptively simple combat and an excellent balance between action, puzzle solving and platforming.

Kena is a spirit guide who helps spirits unable to move on to the next life, whether through lingering guilt or unfinished business. The story follows her as she makes her way through beautiful but dying land in search of her sacred mountain sanctuary, guiding the troubled spirits she encounters along the way. Can’t say enough good things about the character design, facial expressions, and animation of Bridge of Spirits, which do an incredible job of immediately making anyone you meet, especially Kena herself.

She’s so likable, in fact, that it makes it a bit disappointing that we never really learn everything about her. You get clues about her background and history, but never anything that gets you to know her the same way you get to know the spirits and other characters she ends up interacting with. It’s a shame because she’s the one we spend the most time with, and everything else about her is awesome and made me want to know more.

In many ways, Bridge of Spirits is a throwback to the classic 3D Zelda games style of having a large overworld divided into main areas and then guiding you through them in a linear fashion. Each area will then ask you to collect X amount of Y items, fight a boss, and then get an upgrade that will allow you to travel and explore the next area. It’s very simple and stereotypical, but it works elegantly: Each area is home to a Corrupted Spirit that Kena must save, and as you explore the area you meet other characters close to the Spirit, learn the story of the way. whose things went wrong for them, find their belongings, watch flashbacks, and then it all ends with a boss fight that knots a nice little bow on the story arc.

Combat, on the other hand, has absolutely nothing to do with Zelda’s. It’s fast, deceptively simple, and surprisingly difficult at normal difficulty level given its cute and colorful demeanor. You have light attacks, heavy attacks, and the ability to use your staff as a bow for ranged attacks, and … that’s pretty much it in terms of your primary offensive tools from start to finish. The combat options were so limited, in fact, that I was rather disappointed at first because most enemies could be killed with just one or two light attack combos, and I didn’t have much reason to do so. something else for much longer than I would have liked in a game that only lasts about nine hours.

Some nuances are introduced in the form of your tiny, adorable Ghibli-esque sprites, unfairly known as Rot. These little dudes help you in battle by invading an enemy and temporarily locking them down, giving you the option of attacking their weak spots or just focusing on taking out surrounding enemies. The ability to command them ties in with a fun contextualized courage meter that builds up as you deal damage, encouraging them to put themselves in danger to aid you.

What really redeems the combat of Bridge of Spirits is that after a while it starts to introduce new types of enemies that strongly encourage you to switch tactics and explore some of the intricacies of its limited tools. Whether that’s using slowing your bow while jumping into the air and aiming at hard-to-hit weak spots, using parry against a hard-to-dodge attack, or using your Rot to immobilize a tough enemy so that you can attack it from behind. There is an overwhelming amount of variety of enemies, and once they started to introduce themselves to the group, I felt like I was constantly being challenged by new and interesting storylines. This is exactly how it should be in a game like this.

You also need to manage your resources very carefully in combat once the difficulty begins to increase significantly later in the campaign. Not only can you use Courage to lock enemies down with the Rot, but you also have to use it to heal by clearing specific areas during combat. There are rarely more than two of these healing points in any given piece, which makes each damage you take incredibly important, and you often have to decide whether you want to use your courage to be able to survive another hit, or use- the to take a lot of damage on an enemy or a boss that is still.

That said, it would have been nice to have a little more to do in a fight. Bridge of Spirts’ progression system doesn’t provide many enticing options for evolving your fighting style, and made me feel cataloged in my approach to fighting – mostly because there’s only one melee weapon, and this weapon never really looked better or different as I continued to play. You can improve your movements, but the impact of these improvements is disappointing to say the least. Three of the four melee buffs are abilities Kena should have right off the bat (two dash attacks and an overhead hit in the air), the post-parry counterattack doesn’t feel much stronger than to attack while the opponent recoils and many other upgrades are just small, barely noticeable incremental improvements. I never thought “It would be nice if I could shoot five arrows instead of four”, especially considering how quickly the arrows regenerate.

There are of course exceptions: a charged bow shot that deals heavy damage at the cost of a bar of courage, a slow hammer blow that could take out a group of enemies at a time, and the ability to activating slow motion while aiming without having to jump in the air was the kind of new technique I was looking for the most. But other than that, I never felt excited about upgrades as they rarely seemed like anything that would be particularly useful or make combat more fun.

Fighting bad guys isn’t all you’ll do in Bridge of Spirits, and the fact that it balances combat, platforming, puzzle solving, and exploration so well is one of its points. strong. You never do a thing for too long. After completing a difficult combat encounter, you will usually be challenged to solve some sort of puzzle to open up the next area, sometimes commanding your small army of Rot like Pikmin to move items in order to press down on them. buttons or give you a platform to stand on. Once you power up the bomb, you will regularly do some fun platforming sequences where you will have to activate a series of platforms and find the best way to get from point A to point B before the platforms. forms do return to their natural state. And then on top of all that, this is an open world with a lot of secrets hidden off the beaten track, although the majority of those secrets you are interested in are another story.

My only gripe about exploring and hunting collectibles is that with the exception of meditation points (which increase your maximum health) none of the collectibles really impacted my game. For context, I’m someone who really doesn’t care that much about cosmetics, which is why I never felt much compelled to research the Bridge of Spirits collectibles when most of the time , they ended up being either new hats for my rot or change that I could use to buy more hats for my rot. Sure, there are Cursed Chests, which are fun to hunt down as they require you to complete a combat challenge to open them – but it’s almost always disappointing when you’re going through a tough battle and your reward is … still a small one. funny hat to put on one of your funny little creatures. So I quickly lost the motivation to do more.

One final area that deserves special mention is boss fights, which are some of the most intense and difficult that I have fought all year. Each fight is distinct, the greats have appropriate epic music, and there are plenty of them too. Some of the smaller boss battles even end up becoming regular enemies that you’ll have to fight against later, and it’s a good way to revisit some of the funniest and most difficult fights.