Shadow of the Colossus (PlayStation 2)

Once you are in the right place a cut scene will show you the colossus breaking out of a mountain or whatever the environment happens to be. These creatures are enormous and you may think impossible to defeat, but each colossi has its weak points. By shining your sword on the beast the suns rays will show you where its weak points are. All you have to do is attack these points and the beast goes down with a bang. The first few are reasonably easy but they get harder as the game progresses. The hard part is to get to the weak spots. Each colossus is made up of rock and hair. If there is hair you can climb up and hang on, if there is rock these offer ledges that you can stand on or grab on to. However you can only grip on for so long, on the bottom right of the screen there is a pink circle, as you hold on this circle will gradually deplete, once the circle disappears you will loose your grip and fall, however if you can find a place to stand on the beast without falling the circle will refill itself. Underneath this circle is a red bar this is your health meter, as you take damage this will reduce but again if you can stand still somewhere safe this will recharge itself. Once you have found and made your way to the beasts weak spot (it takes the form of a kind of glowing tattoo on the beasts body) you need to plunge your sword in. If you press the square button you will see a small expanding circle appear in the pink circle on the bottom right of your screen, once the circle has reached its perimeter this is the optimum time to strike with your sword (or bow) to create the most damage. The health bar for the colossus is at the top of your screen. Sometimes there is more than one weak spot. If the weak spot disappears from view and the beast is still alive it means that another weak spot has appeared elsewhere on the beast and you must find and destroy that before the beast will die. Once the beast is dead the young man absorbs its energy and goes unconscious, he then wakes to find himself back in the temple, the stone replica of the beast will then disintegrate from the wall leading to the shrine and the voice of the gods directs you to the next colossus.

That is basically the game, there are no enemies to defeat in between each battle and no intricate twists of plot. However once again the simplicity of the game is its special quality. Again the environment is breathtaking, each new location that you visit brings a new spectacle, from mountainous regions, to barren, dusty dry lake beds to the luscious greenery of a wooded copse where the sunlight breaks through the trees. You could spend hours just riding across the terrain exploring this strange and beautiful world. The lack of dialogue and plot does not detract from the game at all. We don’t really know who the young man is, what happened to the girl and how he came to know about the temple but none of that matters, the game is what it is, simplicity itself. If the game does have one flaw it is the camera angles during the fight, you can sometimes loose your direction or a piece of scenery will obstruct your view causing you to take damage, but I can live with that.

Shadow of the Colossus is a game like no other. If you like hack and slash battles then this is not the game for you. It is a puzzle based fighting game with the emphasis on the puzzles. If you like a plot that will engross and absorb you, then this is not the game for you, as we know or learn nothing about the two characters in the game. But if you want serenity, beauty and even a kind of gentleness (how often can you say that about a battle based game) or just something completely different then this is the game for you. It is a difficult game to describe and I would like to bet it wont be long before this game also has cult status.