Kena: Bridge of Spirits in Test - is the dream of playable Pixar

Gigantic game worlds, upgrades and nursery and single player stories, whose playing time is good and likes to scratch the 70 hours: Anyone who buys an AAA game in today s gaming landscape often goes a long-term relationship. So what to play if you want a short, crisp experience, but that does not save the production quality at the same time? The answer: Kena - Bridge of Spirits.

For the initial work of the Indie-Studio Ember Labs is a complex designed, refreshingly decreased and fair-priced action adventure, which you can enjoy comfortably on a weekend. Whereby one should not take too literally that with the cozy , but later more!

Table of contents

  1. 1 Lastest travel companion
  2. 2himmlisch beautiful
  3. 3Release The Floofs
  4. 4The dark soul of a war god on the horizon
  5. 5hart, but warmly
  6. 6Blarge feelings for the big staging?

Last travel companion

The extensive village offers a lot of secrets. If you find a ghost mail in other areas, you can put them here in mailboxes and unlock new areas that hold fights and collectables. Source: PC Games near Kena slips into the role of the young woman of the same name, a ghost guide, which accompanies the souls of died people on their last trip to the hereafter. The fragmentary told story leads you to an abandoned mountain village, in which the circulation of life has been disturbed since a mysterious disaster. Toxic flowers and plant monsters draw a tass of devastation through the country, while the souls of the deceased slopes in this part. Your Job: Find out what happened here and finally give the restless ghosts. Since some of the deceased but still have a chicken with the living - so also with you - you have to make you with some hard fight during your spiritual journey.

By pulse, you interact with blue crystals in the game world. The puzzles are entertaining, but not too complex. Source: PC Games Armed with a versatile crystal rod you explore the areas around the mountain village, which are thematically based on special characters, whose earthly conflicts should discover and solve them. For this, Kena gives you a colorful bouquet of action-adventure game elements on the hand, which the title combines a consistent entertaining and successful mix. You hop, climbs, solves smaller puzzles with a manageable, but useful number of magic gadgets, and fight against varied enemies. A large part of the stimuline makes alone the beautiful presentation of the game that actually considers what the trailers have promised: Kena is like a Pixar movie to play themselves!

Heavenly beautiful

The game is impressively detailed, atmospherically illuminated, full of bright colors and charming figurative designs that will bring you a different time to marvel and smile. It is clear to the game that the girls and guys of Ember Lab understand their animation crafts and the Unreal Engine 4. The advanced intermediate sequences that you admire at certain points in the story are of truly masterful quality and absolutely kinoreif, but also the Ingame graphic can be more than seen. The game world is convincing not only with her optics, but is also filled with numerous secrets, which invite you to explore the right openly designed areas. With a handful of characters you should talk too, but you usually have fed off with a few lines. The rod, however, have only eyes for you! Source: PC Games

Release the Floofs

Meditation points extend your lifebarks and relax after hard boss fights. Source: PC Games The most important Collectable is also a central game element. Already after your first few steps in the lauschy forest, you meet for cute, small fur ball named rott, which track you on step and kick as soon as you lured them from their numerous hiding hiding. Whole 100 of these animals are concealed at every corner of the game world - under tree trunks, in pots, at the end of a skidding passage or as a reward for a recovered archer challenge.

Kena: Bridge of Spirits - State of Play Trailer | PS5, PS4

Although these little puzzles are usually not very difficult, but the fact that you usually have to do a little more than just dress up and collect the animals, nevertheless a decent sense of reward. Especially cool: In the PS5 version we tested, your complete fur ball army is presented simultaneously, which lets the way out of the monsters rather extinct game world lives. For even more creased charm, an abundantly pointless, but funny feature: with a dedicated currency that you collect in the game world, you buy any of your companion one of countless hats. We only wanted to mention!

If you feed the rott with fruit distributed in the game, defeat opponents or restored the environment, gets your karma points. They may spend in a small but fine skill menu for meaningful upgrades. Source: PC Games Rott help you explore by writing about far away levers, towing boxes for you or cleaning the death zone heart, making the poisoned parts of the landscape in impressive, seamless transitions again colored. Your gradually advanced skills repertoire reminds pleasantly the legend of Zelda: The fight rod serves simultaneously as a sheet with which you can not only fight, but also interact with magical switches.

Later, a bomb joins with which her destroyed architecture restores and opened new ways. Although Kena does not include real headnuts or too difficult skip passages, but through a very successful entanglement of the well-known and cleanly functioning gameplay elements, there is a consistent entertaining play flow, so that no boring is bored during the course of about ten to fifteen hours. While the fun exploration gameplay keeps you with the pole, but rarely is really challenging, it is surprisingly actually the fighting, where you really come to sweat.

The dark soul of a war god on the horizon

With the toxic plants, a lot of cooked monsters in the mountain village have held in the mountain village, which are always in the way. In the battles, Kena presents itself as a action-rich mix of God of War, Horizon: Zero Dawn and, one likes to believe in the colorful look, even a pinch of soul! With your fighting rod, you have the enemies with two attacks and remotely fires their arrows on glowing weaknesses. Both weapons can enhance their companions: At the beginning of each battle, the rott are still anxious and crawl, but as soon as you have sponsored or inserted enough goals, they support you with mighty powers and punching arrows. In addition, you need the rott to destroy opponent generators and to activate the very sparse distributed medicinal plants. Many opponents have vulnerabilities that you can destroy with the bow. Here you will benefit the cool slow motion function. Source: PC Games Kena has some bossons in the luggage. Some meet you later as standard opponents, but enough variety is still available. Source: PC Games in combination with your scarce life bars and aggressive enemies ensure limited healing possibilities on the normal level of difficulty that you should study the opposing attack patterns and use your entire arsenal. Luckily, the enemies are varied and managed: mostly you get it with a mixture of excursions and shooters to do, which are also supported by flight and explosive monsters.

So your swordshift parrines, hops at the last second over exploding enemies and misses the annoying remote fighter on the back by slow motion function still in the air a headshot. Of course, none of course is new to himself, but Kena also creates it in the battles to unite the elements of well-known action adventures to a very solid mix, which plays like a cast. The only nerve factor: the camera and the lock-on mechanism, with which it fixes the view of a single enemy, were somewhat a bit bitchy and unreliable in the test, which developers seem to work already.

Hard, but warmly

With recharged courage, the rott reinforce your attacks, which is essential in the sweaty fighting. Source: PC Games Special highlights are the commonly scattered and partly really crisp boss fights. Let s get to do it with an oversized knight whose evasive timings have to learn her, sometimes trying to confuse an Assassine with teleports and confusion images, sometimes a flying archer requires fast reflexes and precise targets. The variety is true, the challenge level is surprisingly high, the victories for it all the more rewarding.

Who he wants to make himself easier, buys a small but valuable number of skills in the upgrade menu, or represents the degree of difficulty on storymod . At the lowest level, however, the game is almost too easy, what the fighting takes a lot of her stimulus, while the normal level of difficulty could become too violent for casual players - here an intermediate would be desirable, especially because the game anyway rather with his gameplay as his story shines.

Great feelings for the big staging?

Despite expressive facial expressions, the stories remain pretty thin around the characters whose conflicts should be released. Much you have to browse yourself. Source: PC Games The story is also the only thing that has not quite convinced us at Kena. With its magnificent animated film look and the interesting premise, the game would actually have proved a lot of potential for emotional and moving history, but it never really exhausted it. The few story snippets, which tell you the stories of the characters, are greatly staged, but always kept quite short and cryptic. On your journey, you only meet a handful of other figures, and that are, just like the protagonist, not particularly talkative. But there is hardly a lot to be consulted anyway, because the plot remains flat and simple until the end. After all, the figures are properly set, though only in English. Especially Kenas spokeswoman makes a great job if she takes the word.

Who fears, Kena could become too cheesy in his cute look, designed: The game takes itself seriously, and turns the cuteness factor just high enough. Source: PC Games The expressive animations of the characters and the elaborate soundtrack but despite the flat story ensure that the game world and their inhabitants will remain in memory. The great music accompanies the fighting with neat bombast and when exploring the melodies immerse yourself in the Asian-embossed culture of the mountain village. Those who especially present a film ripe from Kena, and despite little own ideas, expects an excellent playable action adventure, is likely to be more than happy with the title. Especially at fair price of just under 40 euros an absolutely round thing!

Kena: Bridge of Spirits is available for PS5, PS4 and PC (Epic Games Store).

My opinion

Vonstefan Wilhelm editor stefan.wilhelm@computec.de

Cute shell, hard core: Kena is a surprisingly demanding, but the better action adventure!

My fear of the test, the game would become a substance-free and too simple casual adventure that scores primarily with its optics was luckily refuted! Because behind the phenomenal presentation, there is also an absolutely successful mix of well-known and popular action-adventure elements that caught me cold with his hard struggles, and all the more excited. Sure, something more than outside the battles would have been desirable. But too, the compact game is consistently excellent, because no gameplay element acts on and the progress feeling is so successful because Kena remembers essential. Only on the story level I was left a little disappointed. Although the game is troubled to touch me emotionally, however, that did not want to succeed, as history and characters are somewhat too much in the background. Gameplay and presentation are still so successful that they carry Kena loosely over his ten to fifteen hours, and let me wait for the next project of the studio!

See all 12 pictures in the gallery

The extensive village offers a lot of secrets. If you find a ghost mail in other areas, you can put them here in mailboxes and unlock new areas that hold fights and collectables. [Source: PC Games]

By Stefan Wilhelm editor 21.09.2021 at 15:00

Comments

Popular Posts