Kena: Bridge of Spirits Reviews
Ember Lab showed enormous competence with Kena: Bridge of Spirits, the first game in its history. A beautiful plot that transports us to a whole new world and a game with challenges and activities that will please everyone. I'm looking forward to seeing what else they can bring in the future, whether in the form of a sequel or even a new narrative.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
"Kena: Bridge of Spirits" seems to incorporate some game elements in a great animated film. It will give a great fun as long as you adapt to its unbalanced and unadjusted difficulty level.
Review in Korean | Read full review
A good first attempt by a studio that has only worked on animation, but not enough substance in the gameplay to keep you hooked to the very end.
The overall gameplay will be very familiar to 3D adventure fans, but the visuals and charm help to make it feel like a fresh experience in the genre. More adventures for Kena and the Rot would be very welcome.
Kena: Bridge of Spirits is an admirable start for Ember Lab's journey into gaming that still has a bit of room to improve. However, what you'll find here is a special, cute and endearing game that gives players a blast of nostalgia thanks to its retro-inspired level design and objectives.
From the very first moment till the very end of your journey, Kena: Bridge of Spirits is a heart-warming experience and a real pleasure between the visuals, puzzles and combat. Atmospheric music, beautiful lively graphics, believable heroes and cute little Rots - each little element is woven into the amazing whole that is the gaming experience provided by Kena.
Combat is great, exploration is exciting, Rots are cute, the world is beautiful, the music is perfect. Buy it now, and again in November when it is released on disc. I award Kena: Bridge of Spirits a very high-spirited Thumb Culture Platinum Award.
Kena Bridge of Spirits is a good start for Ember Lab and we're curious to see what the studio has in store in the future. When it comes to visuals, the game is up there with Sony's major AAA studios. Unfortunately, it's the gameplay that lags behind quite a bit.
Review in Dutch | Read full review
Kena: Bridge of Spirits is without any doubt a great looking game, in a very familiar and old format, that overstays its welcome mainly because of poor level design and inconsistent gameplay mechanics.
Review in Portuguese | Read full review
In addition to its majestic artistic direction, its stunning staging and its striking musical themes, the title also manages to convince where it was not necessarily expected, thanks to a progression system and a demanding gameplay that borrow the best from references that have proven themselves in the field. Ember Lab is therefore achieving a real tour de force for its first try in the world of gaming and just for that, hats off.
Review in French | Read full review
A masterpiece of staging paired with an entertaining, highly digestible and occasionally motivating game design is probably the surprise hit of the year: Kena: Bridge of Spirits impressively proves that it definitely doesn't take an experienced video game developer to create a stable overall construct that not only knows how to captivate emotionally, but can also entertain. The action-adventure hardly brings any innovation to the busy genre, but clearly creates a certain uniqueness due to its discrepant structure. The cuddly Pixar look meets a darker, clearly more grown-up narrative as well as an (over)demanding battle scene, which nevertheless never manages to lose you on a motivational level. In combination with the clearly digestible gameplay and the really successful technical implementation, the action adventure manages to emancipate itself from its indie niche and fights its way into the relevance range of its AAA competition. Minimal lapses like the miserable focus system or minor frame drops are forgiven for the entertaining adventure, of course. What remains in the end is not only an animation studio that has skillfully proven how a holistic vision can liquidate a lack of experience, but has also given us the second reason to own a PlayStation home console in September. Now we just have to hope that Ember Lab exploits the immense merchandising potential behind the cuddly Rott - they deserve it.
Review in German | Read full review
An enjoyable old-school 3D-platformer that looks great and doesn't have annoying issues of its predecessors of old, like outdated mechanics or janky gameplay.
Review in Russian | Read full review
Whether you demand more than comfort from your games will inform the way you see Kena: Bridge of Spirits; is it merely a graphically sumptuous example of design that you wish we would leave behind, or is it a vivifying tribute to a rich precursor legacy?
One of the most beautiful games of the year. And with amusing gameplay.
Review in Slovak | Read full review
Although far from being revolutionary, Kena Bridge of Sprits is a compelling action-adventure game with an heart-warming hero and really cute creatures to play with. Ember Lab put in this game all their experience in character design and animation, giving us a splendid – but also somewhat repetitive – cartoon movie to play with.
Review in Italian | Read full review
Kena: Bridge of Spirits offered a great story with high-quality cinematic scenes, great graphics, an enchanting world and boss fights with great music, but it didn't live up to that level in the gameplay department and some of the characters in the story are superficial.
Review in Arabic | Read full review
What pleasures Kena provides are intrinsic to most videogames: clicking buttons and finding trinkets. Eventually I did fall into that groove, but it was distracting, not compelling. When all the game's darkness dissipates into bright green, when all wounds can be healed with determination and kindness, when death itself is a collectible friend, it is difficult to feel that distraction was worth it.
Kena: Bridge of Spirits is an incredibly solid and beautiful first entry from Ember Labs.
Kena: Bridge of Spirits is stunning spectacle full of heart and unbelievable charm. If you aren't carefully selecting hats for your Rot companions by the end, then you're probably made of stone. In the event that your soul is inhospitably frosty, Kena can be deceivingly challenging, throwing boss fights at you that will make those on Demon Souls look like a cake walk. A few minor issues stop Kena from being a showstopper, but there is no doubt that this a great game, and an amazing debut for a 15-person strong team.