It’s sandwiches between a “task” and the “end zone” and you just sail through a cave, with a few sporadic cave paintings that aren’t pointed out or even acknowledged. There’s a section just before you enter the final zone of the game that feels like a abandoned storytelling point. The boat feels a bit wonky, and the turret is mostly useless. You’re handed a new set of armour and a new trio of upgrades after doing a “task”, and then you’re fully equipped moments later and off up the river. And the game starts to feel a bit rushed. Makes the effort to accrue moolah up to that point rather pointless, let alone taking the bounties alive for maximum profit. Suddenly you’re reset, and all upgrades are lost. I remembered the tone shift from donkeys ago, but I don’t remember it being this jarring. Despite all my good intentions it just felt completely impossible to render the targets captured alive, not that it mattered because I got all upgrades anyway.Īnd that brings me to the abrupt gear change in the last third of the game. The mechanic of “dead or alive” feels a bit half-baked. It’s a stupid grumble but I was gritting my teeth with that high pitch and tone. The voice work of the second race is just bloody grating. The characters on the whole are charming. They’re also rather uninspired in comparison to the iconic creature design of Abe’s games. And you cannot gather a surplus of ammo, so while it would’ve been cool to grind out collecting ammo, this is not possible.Įnemies feel very spongey, and enemy repetition is very common. By the end of the game you’re smashing ammo crates anyway. Exacerbated by a rather shoddy aim where shooting that one wasp takes way longer than it should. Catching your own ammo is just a chore, a way to add an extra step to a simple game mechanic. The ammo, which was a big feature back then, feels a bit underwhelming returning to it. The gameplay loop is satisfying somewhat, it shows it’s age. I did however appreciate the old school level design of finding something yourself without a million objective markers and compasses holding your hand. The world was often too big, and a little tedious to back and forth.
But looking at this from several generations later I feel it suffers from that “everything bigger” syndrome. Big seamless worlds, dense foliage, and so on. Games have come a long way since those days, but I do see the hallmarks of what was the future at the time. The graphics were mind blowing years ago, I remember marvelling at the water reflection and how real it looked. It did however do a bit of foreshadowing quite well early in its plot. They’re supposed to be extinct and what would Stranger gain from saying he’d seen one? Was he really going to go find one if he could? There’s a bit of a weird contrived flaw in the plot, when Stranger makes reference to seeing something that attracts the attention of the antagonist, but when you know what you know later it seems a bit odd and at odds with that.
I think this is testament to how much better games are at telling stories in this day and age. The story seems a bit flat several years later, and perhaps that’s because I remember the “reveal”. Several years later I returned to it in its HD iteration on the switch and I’ve been left rather disappointed.
I haven’t played this game since it came out on the original Xbox, and I remember being thoroughly charmed and amazed by it.