Why do one when you can do them both at once? S'my motto.īuilding up gradually over the course of various tutorials - filling in the blanks between that spike-to-the-back-of-the-head moment and 'I know Kung Fu' - and at predetermined intervals in-game, the combat system develops from the initial hapless 'shove', to three-hit kick combos and the occasional run-up-someone's-face to a devastating arsenal of uppercuts, aerial attacks, sword-slashes, roundhouses, and more recognisable moves than you'd find flicking through Hello!'s celebrity housing special. There's a very solid base of push and pull here, as there is in any fighting game it's just that here your exertions are amplified accordingly, and evasion is practically capoeira.

What you can expect is to feel like the force behind every flurry, the crankshaft behind every windmill pole-attack, and the momentum behind every combination. Of course you can't expect to throw every punch, land every kick or parry every attack. Where Path of Neo succeeds most is in the collusion of combat control and spectacle. When he cuts down an enemy with a samurai sword, and then without even turning fires the blade into the chap behind him and then boots him off it again before spinning into a roundhouse to someone's slacking jaw, you don't even have to suspend your disbelief. When Neo runs up someone's torso and delivers a skull-crushing volley to the face in slow motion, it ticks the box next to 'true to source material' and the one next to 'suitable videogame moment' so quickly you'd swear it was using two pens.

He's made for this life.Īnd so it proves in The Path of Neo, which follows him from 'Wake up Neo' to machine city. That rules him out of the running for the latest vacancy under my thumbs how, exactly? It sounds more like he inquired about the room in my PS2 and then turned up with a reference from Kurosawa and a character statement from Doomguy. So Neo can punch people 10 times a second, jump between skyscrapers and take on two hundred Hugo Weavings simultaneously. We are programmed to overlook the average lead's implausible capacity for violence and utterly ludicrous resilience in the face of everything from headshots to head-stomps from 90-foot robot-dragons. Too powerful for what? Too powerful to be a videogame character? Don't we, um, routinely withstand the organised might of entire armies when we take on the mantle of an ordinary-guy-with-nothing-to-lose? I've been rookies-on-the-force with nought but a handgun and an entire drugs cartel out to get me, and emerged a cigar-smoking, rocket-launching, bullet-dodging lunatic standing on a mountain of erstwhile goons. Here's what I don't get about Enter The Matrix: It wasn't about Neo because Neo is too powerful.

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