Zone of the Enders Review

It is remembered for the wrong reason. This shipped with a playable demo of the year's most anticipated stealth game, and a great many copies were bought and traded back in without the main disc ever being finished. That is a shame, because the combat is excellent and was doing things in 2001 that took the genre years to catch up to. You fly in full three-dimensional space, lock onto multiple targets, dash, grab enemies and throw them into other enemies, and the whole thing runs fast and clean with art direction that reads as animation rather than plastic.

Leo is a child who does not want to be inside the machine and spends the game saying so, which is a more interesting frame than the usual power fantasy. The problems are real. It is genuinely short, perhaps five hours, the civilian escort objectives are tedious, and the frame rate buckles when the screen fills up. There is a better version of this game and it arrived two years later. This one is still worth the afternoon.