Anybody Played Zeno Clash and Excited for Sequel?

(This post was selected from our Community Blogs to appear on the front page. You can start a blog of your own here.)

Since there is a sequel to a brawler I enjoyed a couple years ago. I wanted to know if anybody here played the first Zeno Clash and is ready in anticipation for Zeno Clash 2. Here is the cinematic trailer and the new official gameplay trailer released by Atlus. Well first I want to talk about my impression of the first game, and then my thoughts on what is revealed about the sequel so far.

Zeno Clash 1 Impressions

I really enjoy beat em' ups like River City Ransom EX, Double Dragon EX and so on. It was nice to see a developer resolve combat situations with their fists rather than guns. Speaking of guns, the firearms in the first Zeno Clash were horrible. There's this one level where you had to shoot dudes ambushing the slow ass moving boat. It was so poorly executed that it counts as a turret sequence. Though the skull grenades were fun to throw at least. There wasn't enough emphasis on melee weapons. Those weapons were only heavy blunt instruments given to you to take out the larger enemies you couldn't beat em' up with fists alone. Despite the lack of, or lackluster design to weapons, Zeno Clash was still visually satisfying to see dudes getting punched in the face. I had fun with the tower challenges in the first game since what I really wanted to do was just beat them extra terrestrial(?) cave men up.

There is a reason for beating these extra terrestrial(?) cave men up. Something about being exiled because the protagonist assaulted his gender-less caretaker, freed some dude that told the truth about that gender-less caretaker, blah blah blah. I didn't really care for the story in Zeno Clash all that much. It did however lead to a somewhat shitty ending mainly because it was a cliffhanger that had a slight chance of never answering back (Threads of Fate for example). Despite some of the problems the first Zeno Clash has, it was a nice linear, visually exquisite, first person ass kicking experience on the 360.

Zeno Clash 2 Mild Skepticism

I gotta say I am excited for this game, yet i'm getting skeptical. So far what ACE team and Atlus promise is that Zeno Clash 2 will be new and improved combat-wise, an open-world scale in size, and have drop-in/drop-out co-op. Despite what has been revealed in the official gameplay trailer (scroll up top to highlighted words if you haven't already), it seems to me that ACE team's old habits are dying hard. I still don't see that emphasis on melee weapons I wished for. I think the open-world will be open sections rather than sandbox in depth. There are fire-arms in this sequel, but they aren't the stupid stone age rifles like in the first one. Honestly it is hard to tell what these new weapons even do. However it looks like ACE team has been playing a lot of Tekken Tag 2 because now the combat has been improved to be able to do air juggles now. I'm glad that ACE team is going for an open-world experience and improving what the last game did. I still see that when it come to multiplayer, ACE is only focusing on co-op rather than traditional deathmatch battles.

I just hope that these guys give Zeno Clash 2 the improved execution this series very much deserves. I still don't care for the story despite continuing from the last game. So what do you guys think?