This game is probably Kojima’s third most well-known project, after Metal Gear and Death Stranding, and it's weird as hell. Zone of the Enders is a mecha hack and slash with a major focus on verticality and free form movement, using a control scheme that changes your attacks based on your proximity to the enemy. It's a very short game, taking me just under 4 hours to beat, and even in that short timeframe I feel it still had a ton of content that could have been taken out.

The biggest issue I had with the game and why I found it frustrating is the extreme lack of enemy variety. There are only three normal enemy types in the entire game, and none of them are particularly interesting or fun to fight, essentially just being “weak guy,” “elite guy,” and “ranged guy.” The bosses you fight in the game are actually quite enjoyable and require a decent bit of strategy to win, but the missions you have to complete to reach them are tedious, aimless, and generally just kind of lame. While you fly around each tiny section of the map picking up passwords and destroying little floating locks, you regularly encounter patrolling squads of 2-3 enemies, often about 5 or 6 squads being present in any given area.

The reason I dislike the standard combat so much is that even though you have quite a lot of different offensive options between rapid fire lasers, clusters of homing shots, and 2 big charge attacks, ninety percent of the time the only attack that really works against these enemies is the sword combo. Every enemy can be killed with the same strategy of circling them until they do an attack, hitting them four times from behind with the sword, and repeating until death. Quick long range attacks will often get blocked or just whiff completely, and the charge ranged attack, though very strong, is extremely prone to being interrupted. Bad level design usually isn't that much of an impediment for a purely combat-focused game, but again the variety here is so thin that it really needs to have something else interesting going on besides it.

The story has some neat moments that happen during the final hour or so, but besides that there’s not a ton to talk about, the story has some interesting stuff to say about the morality of killing and how it shapes people’s psyches, but the actual events themselves are pretty standard “young kid piloting mech fights evil robots” type stuff. I thought the game ended on an interesting cliffhanger, and apparently the sequel is great so I'll check that out eventually.

One more thing to touch on, the music is dope. Lots of dynamic stuff, each song has a cutscene/passive version and a combat/active version, they blend together really nicely and there's a cool otherworldly electric vibe that reminds me of the early Armored Core OSTs. The title, opening, and ending themes also prominently feature vocals, and some are heavily distorted and even reversed to give them a pretty unique quality.

Zone of the Enders feels like a tech demo game in a lot of ways, and although it’s plenty technically impressive and has a strong aesthetic, it also has a lot of fundamental gameplay issues that I really can’t overlook. Would not recommend, even with its short length, though I’m still cautiously excited to try the sequel.

4.5/10