Kena: Bridge of Spirits Reviews
Kena: Bridge of Spirits is a game in a million. Without being perfect or making big fuss, it manages to excite and involve us with it and show us how a good game should be.
Review in Spanish | Read full review
Kena: Bridge of Spirits is a good game that could have been better had Ember Labs tightened up the combat controls and offered better reasons to explore the gorgeous world they created. I hope Kena is a big hit so Ember Labs can have another go at it, and hopefully get more ambitious and really nail down their combat. Meanwhile considering how much I was looking forward to this game, Kena: Bridge of Spirits can’t help but feel a little disappointing.
Kena: Bridge of Spirits is a remarkable and magical adventure, and it’s honestly still hard to believe this is an indie title. This is the kind of game that simply needs to be part of every gamer’s library and one that raises the bar for the adventure genre in this generation. With emotional story beats, a compelling game world, engaging level design, challenging boss battles, and surprising combat versatility, Kena: Bridge of Spirits is an experience far greater than the sum of its many interconnected parts.
Ember Lab's debut game looked quite charming from the start and the final product keeps the same charm. Kena: Bridge of Spirits is an great fairytale that is gripping from start to finish, even though gameplay-wise it's a bit too safe.
Review in Slovak | Read full review
Kena: Bridge of Spirits grounds itself on relaxation, healing, and cuteness, getting us to reflect and meditate on the beauty in the world when there is darkness abound. While lacking in several narrative areas, the gameplay and overall peaceful vibe of the title keep it engaging and enjoyable.
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.
It’s without question an essential in 2021, despite some minor drawbacks in its writing and creative premise. It does make good on its expectations for being that casual, cinematic game that everyone will fall in love with. Kena: Bridge of Spirits is an adorable action-adventure that players will come away feeling overjoyed and elated.
I’ve mentioned a lot of other games throughout this review. Uncharted, Jak & Daxter, Pikmin, I could name a few more too. While not a lot here is fully original, almost everything is well-executed, and when you add an excellent story and a ton of personality, you have a winning experience. Although there are a few minor issues here and there, Kena: Bridge of Spirits provides a wonderful base that we can only hope future games will build on.
Kena: Bridge of Spirits is not without flaws in having redundancy problems after a few hours or by not innovating in the field of action and adventure games. Nevertheless, Ember Labs successfully entered the field with a first full game with its own identity and its own untold story. A wonderful universe and breathtaking cinematics for a very small independent team. The title sets the bar very high for big studios who would like to offer this same kind of experience in the future!
Review in French | Read full review
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 is a good reminder of how innovative an indie developer can be. With a fascinating world to explore, problems to solve, and friends to make, it’s easy to be impressed. Sure, there are some shortcomings, such as weak combat or generic puzzles, though the core adventure certainly makes up for it.
At the end of the day, the biggest selling point of Kena: Bridge of Spirits is its graphics and animations. Cutscenes all feel worthwhile with great characters and environments that suck you in. It really makes me want this team to make a full movie in this world.
"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
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 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
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
Kena: Bridge of Spirits is an incredibly solid and beautiful first entry from Ember Labs.
If you ignore the laziness of Ember Lab in everything that has to do with items and weapons, and as long as you are not bothered by technical issues, you will spend ten hours very pleasantly with Kena: Bridge of Spirits
Review in Greek | Read full review
If you are as enamored with the visuals in the trailer as I was, Kena was worth the wait. With their first game, Ember Lab has something here, the beginning of something fantastic. At $29.99 there is tremendous value there. Although, during my play-through, I could not help but wonder what it would be like if it were a $70, AAA game that spent five years in development with hundreds of developers. Maybe next time, Ember Labs, maybe next time.