Have You Played... Attack On Titan: Wings Of Freedom?

Have You Played? is an endless stream of game retrospectives. One a day, every day, perhaps for all time.

Attack On Titan: Wings of Freedom [official site] is a solid 7/10 kind of game, but its concepts and combat are unusual enough that I find myself thinking about it a lot more than other, better games. In short: Attack on Titan is Spider-Man vs. Godzilla in an open world with destructible buildings.

The game is based on the Attack On Titan anime. Set in a fantasy world where humanity has been nearly wiped out by the presence of enormous, naked, occasionally skinless giants called Titans, you're part of a military squad in the last human city. To fight back against the Titans, you're given twin grappling hooks, a jetpack of sorts, and a pair of swords with which to cut off their limbs and stab at their weak spots.

All of these things are a thrill to use in tandem. You connect the grapples to buildings and use the jetpack to build momentum, and once I got good, I could traverse the length of large urban areas without once touching the ground. I'd bound across the city, get close enough to a Titan that I could use the grapple to latch onto them while still in mid-air, and after lining up an attack, trigger the jetpack to dash in and slice off an arm or a leg. Taking out a leg causes the Titan to fall over, of course, and if they land on a building then that building crumples beneath them. It's spectacular.

The fighting wears thin before the end of the game, it's graphically rudimentary, and the plot - which follows the anime exactly - is of little interest beyond the core concept. But what a concept.