Kena is a baffling experience: though its childish art style, naif narrative and focus on cosmetic items seem to hint at a product intended for a younger audience, its sudden and absurd difficulty spikes seem to be pandering to the Dark Souls crowd, leaving you to wonder exactly who this game was meant for.
In it we play the role of the eponymous Kena, a young medium tasked with sending restless spirits to a peaceful afterlife. Not a novel concept by any stretch, but at the very least a fine premise for an action game. Unfortunately, the story the game tells is as uninteresting as they come, offering little drama or even any twists to keep the player engaged. If you're really into recent Disney animated features, chances are you will find this more engaging than I did.
Kena's main means of defense is a quarterstaff that doubles as a bow, plus a gaggle of overly cute minions called "rot", who allow her to perform various special attacks and interact with the environment. These creatures are a cowardly lot, so Kena needs to damage enemies in order to make her minions gain courage, symbolized by a filling bar. Muster enough courage and you will earn a charge to spend on whatever action you want, from healing to unleashing super attacks.
Combat seeks to be a blend of Dark Souls and Horizon Zero Dawn, alternating melee combos to slow motion precision archery. Good on paper, but the lock-on system is simply too poor to be useful: not only is its range pitiful, not only does it break constantly, but it also makes your roll direction relative to the targeted enemy, instead of simply focusing the camera on them and leaving you free to evade in any direction. As a result, you will often dodge right into an attack, as opposed to away from it, meaning it's usually far better to skip locking on entirely and keeping your enemy in sight manually.
Some of the bosses are made especially aggravating by this factor, since you might not be able to see their attacks as they are being telegraphed for you to avoid, simply because the lock-on is such a chore to deal with and you might be looking elsewhere whben things are happening.
Concerning bosses, these often present some unreasonable difficulty spikes: there is one in particular that keeps teleporting around firing high damage homing fireballs and spawning low level enemies to harass you. Not content with that, the developers gave it the ability to heal completely without limits when under a certain HP value. Fighting one is annoying enough, but when the game forces you in a main quest fight with two of them at the same time (only they now spawn exploding kamikaze bugs instead), things get really annoying really quickly.
And that's when the game even bothers to explain its mechanics which, despite the overabundance of tutorial messages, it fails to do on more than one occasion, like with the spirit dash skill, which is explained to you as a defensive and traversal ability, but in reality it is also required to be used as an offensive move, which the game never explains in any way. Being crucial to defeating late game enemies, this is a grave omission.
Despite some cool attacks (detonating bombs to debuff and slow down enemies is fun), combat is generally not very good: melee attacks lack oomph, hitboxes are often imprecise and some enemies seem to be missing frames of animation, throwing off your prediction of their patterns. At least archery is entertaining, rewarding timing and precision.
When not following the combat-rich main story, going off the beaten path will present you with the chance for limited exploration with some light platforming, combat challenges and very easy puzzles. The rewards for these activities are usually chests, whose contents range in usefulness from good to absolutely pointless. Specifically, a lot of these contain nothing but hats that you can make your rot minions wear, with no benefit or effect to the gameplay whatsoever: you're simply making your barely visible pokemon a tad more colorful.
What's worse, unlike games like Jedi Fallen Order, whose chests largely contained nothing but cosmetic items, but had the sense of being clearly color coded so you knew that was the case, Kena likes to surprise you with the contents of a chest: it might be a useful rot upgrade that contributes to unlocking more of your skill tree, or a talisman to aid you in combat... or, more often than not, it will be just a pointless hat that does absolutely nothing.
It would have been easy to tie some kind of gameplay system to what hats your minions are wearing, for instance their action bars might have charged faster depending on the pooled rarity score of the hats they are wearing, or the duration and damage of their effects on enemies might have been affected. None of that is here: there is absolutely no purpose to the hats and, as such, to the crystals used to purchase them from the hat store, which you find in great abundance around the world, making even more chests and containers completely pointless.
As you progress through the campaign, a dedicated trial mode becomes available in the main hub, consisting of archery challenges and boss rematches under stricter circumstances (take no damage, do it under the time limit). Each rank presents you with three challenges, offering undisclosed rewards: sometimes they are mildly useful buff charms that complement your playstyle with frankly negligible bonuses; more often though the unlocks are just hats or outfits that change none of your stats or abilities. As a result, it becomes fairly demotivating to deal with these recycled content trials when the rewards are so inconsequential.
There is nothing more disappointing than completing a tough combat challenge (usually by fighting old bosses now fought in pairs or with unfun handicaps applied), only to be awarded with a "rare" hat, which does absolutely nothing the same way a common one does. It only costs more to equip for the same effect, that is to say, bugger all.
Kena Bridge of Spirits is definitely a mixed bag: while on one hand it delivers some passably basic basic combat, exploration and puzzles, on the other the lack of a compelling story and especially the disappointing nature of the loot you find (unless you really, really enjoy playing self-contained dolls dress-up) make it a half-baked product.
It's a decent enough first effort from a new studio, and a budget-priced title at that, but considering some industry veterans worked on it, there are many areas in which they should have known better.
Most of all, the jarring disconnect between its visual presentation and bizarre difficulty spikes makes this difficult to recommend for any of its possible audiences.
In it we play the role of the eponymous Kena, a young medium tasked with sending restless spirits to a peaceful afterlife. Not a novel concept by any stretch, but at the very least a fine premise for an action game. Unfortunately, the story the game tells is as uninteresting as they come, offering little drama or even any twists to keep the player engaged. If you're really into recent Disney animated features, chances are you will find this more engaging than I did.
Kena's main means of defense is a quarterstaff that doubles as a bow, plus a gaggle of overly cute minions called "rot", who allow her to perform various special attacks and interact with the environment. These creatures are a cowardly lot, so Kena needs to damage enemies in order to make her minions gain courage, symbolized by a filling bar. Muster enough courage and you will earn a charge to spend on whatever action you want, from healing to unleashing super attacks.
Combat seeks to be a blend of Dark Souls and Horizon Zero Dawn, alternating melee combos to slow motion precision archery. Good on paper, but the lock-on system is simply too poor to be useful: not only is its range pitiful, not only does it break constantly, but it also makes your roll direction relative to the targeted enemy, instead of simply focusing the camera on them and leaving you free to evade in any direction. As a result, you will often dodge right into an attack, as opposed to away from it, meaning it's usually far better to skip locking on entirely and keeping your enemy in sight manually.
Some of the bosses are made especially aggravating by this factor, since you might not be able to see their attacks as they are being telegraphed for you to avoid, simply because the lock-on is such a chore to deal with and you might be looking elsewhere whben things are happening.
Concerning bosses, these often present some unreasonable difficulty spikes: there is one in particular that keeps teleporting around firing high damage homing fireballs and spawning low level enemies to harass you. Not content with that, the developers gave it the ability to heal completely without limits when under a certain HP value. Fighting one is annoying enough, but when the game forces you in a main quest fight with two of them at the same time (only they now spawn exploding kamikaze bugs instead), things get really annoying really quickly.
And that's when the game even bothers to explain its mechanics which, despite the overabundance of tutorial messages, it fails to do on more than one occasion, like with the spirit dash skill, which is explained to you as a defensive and traversal ability, but in reality it is also required to be used as an offensive move, which the game never explains in any way. Being crucial to defeating late game enemies, this is a grave omission.
Despite some cool attacks (detonating bombs to debuff and slow down enemies is fun), combat is generally not very good: melee attacks lack oomph, hitboxes are often imprecise and some enemies seem to be missing frames of animation, throwing off your prediction of their patterns. At least archery is entertaining, rewarding timing and precision.
When not following the combat-rich main story, going off the beaten path will present you with the chance for limited exploration with some light platforming, combat challenges and very easy puzzles. The rewards for these activities are usually chests, whose contents range in usefulness from good to absolutely pointless. Specifically, a lot of these contain nothing but hats that you can make your rot minions wear, with no benefit or effect to the gameplay whatsoever: you're simply making your barely visible pokemon a tad more colorful.
What's worse, unlike games like Jedi Fallen Order, whose chests largely contained nothing but cosmetic items, but had the sense of being clearly color coded so you knew that was the case, Kena likes to surprise you with the contents of a chest: it might be a useful rot upgrade that contributes to unlocking more of your skill tree, or a talisman to aid you in combat... or, more often than not, it will be just a pointless hat that does absolutely nothing.
It would have been easy to tie some kind of gameplay system to what hats your minions are wearing, for instance their action bars might have charged faster depending on the pooled rarity score of the hats they are wearing, or the duration and damage of their effects on enemies might have been affected. None of that is here: there is absolutely no purpose to the hats and, as such, to the crystals used to purchase them from the hat store, which you find in great abundance around the world, making even more chests and containers completely pointless.
As you progress through the campaign, a dedicated trial mode becomes available in the main hub, consisting of archery challenges and boss rematches under stricter circumstances (take no damage, do it under the time limit). Each rank presents you with three challenges, offering undisclosed rewards: sometimes they are mildly useful buff charms that complement your playstyle with frankly negligible bonuses; more often though the unlocks are just hats or outfits that change none of your stats or abilities. As a result, it becomes fairly demotivating to deal with these recycled content trials when the rewards are so inconsequential.
There is nothing more disappointing than completing a tough combat challenge (usually by fighting old bosses now fought in pairs or with unfun handicaps applied), only to be awarded with a "rare" hat, which does absolutely nothing the same way a common one does. It only costs more to equip for the same effect, that is to say, bugger all.
Kena Bridge of Spirits is definitely a mixed bag: while on one hand it delivers some passably basic basic combat, exploration and puzzles, on the other the lack of a compelling story and especially the disappointing nature of the loot you find (unless you really, really enjoy playing self-contained dolls dress-up) make it a half-baked product.
It's a decent enough first effort from a new studio, and a budget-priced title at that, but considering some industry veterans worked on it, there are many areas in which they should have known better.
Most of all, the jarring disconnect between its visual presentation and bizarre difficulty spikes makes this difficult to recommend for any of its possible audiences.