Here my take on this game seeing as how i just recently played through it.
Graphics - I know people who think this is the best looking PS2 game ever. I don't know how they can possibly believe this. The game looks sort of like a PS1 game with better textures and no texture sliding. I know it's what they were going for, but the game also looks rather washed out in terms of colors. The open world is nice but there really is way too much scenery pop-up and the frame rate tends to be choppy. Basically the visuals are pretty spotty. Some areas look amazing, most are just bland and washed
out. I did like the fur textures. Wanders walking/running animations were laughable to say the least, seriously someone purposely animated the poor guy like that.
Gameplay - Well, the collossus battle are pretty good, damn good. Unfortunately there also all pretty much
the same thing- Find a way to get on collossus (usually the best part of the fight), climb on collossus, stab,
stab again or fall off, repeat. Other than collossus fights there really is very little to do except collect lizards
and fruit. Personally this it what irks me the most about the game, it feels like a zelda copy with everything
removed to make way for the bosses. The controls are adeqaute but not really as good as they should be.
Compare this game to Prince of Persia which has similar game mechanics and it is quite lacking. Also the camera need to die. It is truely one of the worst cameras I have ever dealt with, especially on the
last collossus where the entire battle becomes an effort to fight the camera. This saps some of the fun
outta the game to say the least.
Sound - Effects are not really that good, music is fairly epic.
Overall - Depite its problems I still think it is one of the best, if not the best, titles on the PS2. Still it's not as polished at it should be, its like they gave up when the game was like 20% finished. I enjoyed everything up to the chore that was fighting the camera....er...last boss, and the lizard catching took some getting used to. Perhaps the biggest critism I have of this game is that it IS so highly rated, don't get me wrong the game is good enough that you can enjoy it despite it problems, but its problems are too much to completely ignore. That is why even though I enjoyed it almost more than anything else on the PS2, I wouldn't rate it as high as God of War, or Ratchet and Clank. Bottomline - too many problems that could have and should have been fixed.
Seriously, I wouldn't be able to give this game a numerical score. On one hand I want to give an 8-9, but then I think about the camera issues, the framerate, the lack of content, the spotty visuals and I want to give a 4-5. I'm so conflicted.
Art is nice, sloppness is unacceptable.
Umm, my post was, and still is a little screwed up for some reason. It didn't word wrap properly.
