attacks and weapons such as bone clubs.
While you start out with just one, you can
eventually hotkey three stances and three
specials at once. The Boxing stance is the
all-rounder, a sturdy beginner’s pick.
Mammoth is about slow but devastating
elbow drops, while Lightning is for speedy
combos. Slash is the crowd control
stance, while Spear doles out straight
punches that keep you out of grabbing
distance during tougher one-on-ones.
It’s mouth-wateringly technical, but
what really sells it is Pseudo himself: huge
hands and feet, coiled shoulders and
forearms, knees and elbows you could
split boulders with. It’s a pleasure to watch
him work, hammering angry rhino folk off
balance and sweeping the ankles from
beneath squidgy, grinning ogres.
ACE is particularly proud of the ability
to cancel attacks into a dodge or special
move, a la Street Fighter: as cofounder
Carlos Bordeu says, “This is one of the
central, unique things that makes Clash
feel very different to other third person
combat games.” But the combat’s
showpiece feature is surely the option to
finish a brawl in first-person, battering
enemies around with maximum prejudice
at the cost of peripheral awareness.RITUAL COMBAT
Enclosing all this is the Ritual, a ceremonial
pre-fight dice game, played both by NPCs
and other people online, that gives Clash’s
often-frantic brawling a sense of theatre
and structure, even sportsmanship.
Influenced by the quickdraw duelling
mechanics of Ghost of Tsushima, it’s
played by wagering the titular Artifacts of
Chaos, which oblige the loser to fight with
a variety of disadvantages. Players can
skew their dice rolls by placing spikes on
the board that, for example, flip dice in a
line or lock down parts of the board.
The consequences of losing the Ritual
are many, strange and unpleasant. You
might have to fight while chained to a pole
or in a cloud of mist, or while dodging a
swarm of hornets. Lest all this sound like a
nuisance, ACE is exploring options to
streamline or skip this aspect of Clash, but
doing so feels like missing out on a vital
piece of the narrative. “The ritual is a
pretty significant part of the storybecause the main antagonist has these
master Artifacts which give her control
over the people of this land,” Andrés
Bordeu comments.
Where previous Zeno Clash games
were essentially closed paths, Clash is
very open-ended, spreading out from a
town hub with crafting facilities to sporing
jungles and snowy mountainsides. Those
unsettling silhouettes on the horizon can
actually be visited this time, and there are
crafting materials and Artifacts to find
together with shortcuts between areas.WEIRD SCIENCE
If there’s the fear that Clash is taking too
many cues from other franchises, rest
assured that this is very much an ACE
Team universe. Andrés Bordeu is elusive
about how this version of the Zenozoik
world relates to the settings of the
previous games. “In the first Zeno Clash,
you encountered what we call the
endworld, a civilisation that was far more
developed but kind of dormant, and that
no one dared explore. That kind of setting
is suggested here, but it’s more in decay
and you’re counting up the remnants.”
All this reflects not just the developer’s
interest in surrealism but a bigger
investment in technology (and people –
Clash is the work of 25, in addition to
outsourcing). The game runs on Unreal
Engine 4 but has its own custom
rendering system. “With Zeno Clash 1 and
2 , we went deep into the shapes, the
lighting,” Andrés Bordeu says. “But the
rendering and presentation of the
surfaces still felt kind of traditional. We’ve
invested a lot of work in this kind of
illustrated direction, based on the fantasy
books of the 1980s.” It makes for an
arresting vista, even next to the grandest
of open world blockbusters. Landscapes
are vivid up close but desaturate with
distance, as though the illustration were
fading back into the paper.
Zeno Clash 2, as ACE Team has
admitted, was too ambitious for the
resources at its disposal. It wanted to be
the blockbuster sequel, but couldn’t go
the distance. Artifacts of Chaos feels like a
game that’s learned from that mistake. Its
horizons are wider, but not at the expense
of the moment-to-moment. Its
inspirations are overt – we rarely hear
developers talk so straightforwardly about
their influences. But in key respects it’s
the same old Zeno Clash – lulling you with
its visual imagination, only to boot you
squarely in the jaw.
Edwin Evans-ThirlwellTHE CONSEQUENCES OF
LOSING THE RITUAL ARE
STRANGE AND UNPLEASANTClash:Artifacts of Chaos
PREVIEW