El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron HD Remaster review — Losing faith

El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron is one of those games I’ve always meant to play. It’s an artsy action game that’s a loose adaptation of the book of Enoch from Judaism, which sounds exactly up my alley. It was on the PS3 and 360 back in 2011 and eventually got a surprise PC release a few years ago. Now the game has come back to consoles through El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron HD Remaster (even though the game was originally released in HD, but whatever). I played the Switch version for this review, which was a mistake, but even without that specific console’s limitations, I found the game to be less than the sum of its parts.

In El Shaddai: Ascension of the Metatron HD Remaster, you play as Enoch, a man sent from Heaven by God to purify a group of fallen angels who have built a tower to corrupt humanity. Along for the ride is Lucifel, who acts as Enoch’s handler and reports to God, allowing you to save your game. There are also various angels who will color commentate your adventure, and a girl Enoch finds along the way who suddenly becomes very important. I also think the girl is supposed to be blind but the game forgets that very quickly. Despite the very interesting premise, the game really isn’t interested in telling you its story outside of some very vague cutscenes. I feel like reading the book of Enoch may be a requirement to actually understand what the heck is going on over the game’s 11 chapters.

So is the game focused instead on combat? Well, also no. Enoch has four weapons he can use: fists, which is objectively bad as the game tells you; the Arch, a Batleth-type weapon which is the all-rounder; the Gale which lets you fire holy paper airplanes from a distance; and the Shield to go on the defensive in between powerful but slow punches. As you fight with these weapons (aside from barehanded), they’ll become corrupted and eventually break. You can revert this corruption by purifying them with the L button, but this leaves you vulnerable. Instead, you want to steal weapons from enemies to instantly purify them by pressing L when they are knocked out, indicated by a blue circle around them.

This is a great idea, but is let down by combat’s incredible simplicity in all aspects. You mash Y to attack, pause between a press to do a guard break move, and hold the button for a charge attack that is universally useless. This could be fine with enemy variety and a good dodging or block and parry system, but there are only 3 real enemy types with the rest being cannon fodder. You see, since Enoch needs to be able to steal weapons at any moment in combat, almost every enemy has one of three movesets, making every encounter feel exactly the same.

Somewhat of an exception to this are the bosses. While their moves are different, there’s still no real way to avoid or block attacks. You do have a dedicated block button with R, but using it is usually to your detriment since enemies can break your block at the drop of a hat, especially bosses. You can also dodge by pressing jump (B or A) while blocking, but this really doesn’t help in any way shape or form. Really, the solution to each encounter is to mash, occasionally use your weapon’s launcher by holding block then pressing attack to break up the monotony, and just taking the hits as they come. This is because when you reach 0 HP, indicated by the gauge in the top left or Enoch being stripped down to his Edwin brand jeans (which you can actually purchase again this year), you can mash buttons to be revived instantly with about half health. I played on Normal difficulty, and this was the solution to every single fight in the entire game.

There is one other extremely cool thing the game does with its combat. Throughout the game, bosses will suddenly take you to another dimension in the middle of a level essentially to beat the tar out of you real quick. However, any damage you deal to them during this time is permanent, allowing you to go into their proper fight with some HP taken off. I genuinely wish more action games did this, because it’s just too cool.

When you’re not fighting, you’ll be platforming though some incredibly weird stages. Really, the platforming is the majority of the game, but unfortunately it’s not very interesting. You have a double jump and the Arch and Gale have a glide and dash move respectively to assist with that, but it really just feels like a formality between combat encounters, which are already bland enough. The most interesting things get are some platforms that fall while you’re standing on them, so you need to jump between two constantly to ascend a wall. Other challenges, like avoiding pendulums between jumps, are just annoying because depth perception in El Shaddai is essentially non-existent.

Ascension of the Metatron is a drop dead gorgeous game. There are some seriously stunning scenes, and it’s all thanks to the unique art direction making everything look like part of a living painting. Unfortunately, this can make things very difficult to parse, you might think the next platform is slightly to the left when it’s actually straight ahead, causing Enoch to fall into the abyss and lose a bit of HP. This happens constantly, even in 2D sections somehow. At best it’s uninteresting, but at worst the platforming becomes incredibly annoying.

The final nail in Enoch’s coffin is performance on Nintendo Switch. Occasionally the game can reach 60 fps, which is impressive, but it really only does that when there’s nothing else happening on screen. In many scenes, it feels like El Shaddai is struggling to even exist, dipping well below 30. Shockingly, this is most apparent in the menus of all things. Pressing down on the D-Pad a single time will sometimes have the desired effect of moving your cursor down one item, but more often than not it’ll move two or more times. I wanted to rebind the controls a little, which to give the game credit is an option, but after spending a few minutes trying I gave up because I just could not get the cursor to hover over any option I wanted.

El Shaddai feels like less than the sum of its parts. There are some great ideas here that just don’t come together well. The only portion of the game I really enjoyed was the bike section in the Final Fantasy XIII intro area, and even then it was super clunky. The art style is stunning, but I’m not sure it’s worth struggling through the rest of the game to look at.

See below for our list of partners and affiliates: