General Information
Yes, while Kena and company look absolutely phenomenal, and the surprisingly edgy combat will keep action fans happy enough, you don't have to spend too long playing to find yourself slightly disappointed by a bland storyline and straightforward level design. There's also an overall simplicity to the tools and tricks at your disposal that makes it hard to find anything truly unique or exciting in the long-term.
Assuming Kena's role as a spirit guide, it's your job to help spirits who find themselves lost betwixt life and death due to unfinished business, emotional traumas or spotty network connection to Google Maps. At the beginning of her journey, Kena is headed for a sacred mountain shrine, however she soon discovers that a particularly powerful forest spirit is corrupting and twisting the world into a dangerous mess. There's always one.
It's now up to you to rid the forest of corruption using your souls-lite combat techniques and some cute little pals called Rot, which is quite a harsh label as they've all been perfectly nice and extremely hygienic during our time with them. Anyway, the Rot can be found hiding all over the game's world, they're fun little collectibles really, you can even dress 'em up in silly hats (also collectibles). As you gather the scamps up, you increase your ability to do a handful of tasks with them; calling them forth to shut down enemy portals, grab important health items, attack foes and so on.
It's kinda like Pikmin at times, but nowhere near as clever or carefully constructed. And that's where this game's biggest problem lies. Its world is beautiful, and genuinely fun to explore and spend time in, we love the eastern vibes and mystical aspects to it all. However, it rarely lives up to its full potential with regards to its environmental puzzles and how it chooses to block your path forward. It's just not clever enough at times, which is fine if you stick to aiming everything at a younger audience, but Ember Lab has confused the issue by having properly challenging combat added to this easygoing mix.
The combat in Kena: Bridge of Spirits is easily its strongest point. It keeps things relatively streamlined and simple, sticks to what's worked in other Souls-inspired efforts and puts together some fairly intense encounters that force the player to get to grips with all of Kena's abilities. You'll need to mix things up, parry at the right time with your bubble shield to do big damage and stun foes, slow down time with your bow to ensure clean and precise shots, and make good use of dodges to get the right side of some properly good boss fights.
It's in the action that this game earns the majority of its brownie points, then, it's very impressive, tight and tidy stuff that keeps the pummel-party rolling along nicely for the most part, but this still sits a little uneasily with the rest of what's put forth. Between scraps, and beyond the odd bit of corruption that needs smashed with a water attack, or some bridge that needs shot down with an arrow, there's not much to tax you or even to dig into with regards to lore or characters. We learn precious little about Kena, and although the sparse conversations between characters suits the mood and the meditative, nature-focused narrative, in practice it makes for a game that's hard to connect with outside of its kinetic fisticuffs.
There's not much to levelling up or choosing skills either, all of this stuff is kept to a minimum, and although it's nice to be able to concentrate solely on smashing baddies, it still sits sort of strangely that everything seems designed for younger gamers - until a scrap starts.
Putting these issues aside, we've still ended up enjoying our time with this one, both on PlayStation at launch and now on Xbox Series X. Regardless of the shortcomings outside scraps, and even with a running time short enough to see the campaign through in about ten hours, Kena: Bridge of Spirits remains an enjoyable action effort that respects your time, gives you some truly lush environs to bound through, and serves up a few boss scraps worth savoring. Stick the difficulty up to the hardest setting and you're in for a right doing, too, so don't think there isn't a challenge hidden behind all those cute little Rot smiles and silly hats, pal.
On a final note, and with regards to performance, we did notice the odd stutter here and there with the framerate, even in the game's performance mode. It sticks to 60FPS for the most part but, as was the case on PS5, there are drops on some occasions, which is a shame to see so far down the line from the game's initial release. There's no gameplay-ruining issues, to be clear, just some very slight stutters now and again, but it detracts from what is otherwise a smooth experience.
We did also feel that the quality mode, once you've tried the game on performance, feels way less responsive and even a little juddery (listen, it's a word) when turning the camera. The pay-off is you get a graphical boost that's very hard to notice when you're busy bashing forest fruitcakes, so we'd leave it on performance.
Conclusion
Kena: Bridge of Spirits is a super solid debut for Ember Labs that serves up an enchanting atmosphere, slick and challenging combat and some very cute companions in the form of the ROT. It does all feel a little muddled in who it's trying to attract at times, with simple puzzles and streamlined upgrade options attached to combat that pulls no punches. However, a respectful run-time, stellar visuals and a procession of very decent boss scraps ensure that this one still manages to find itself on our recommend pile.
