Attack on Titan: Humanity in Chains

Attack on Titan: Humanity in Chains often can't shake the limitations of the 3DS platform, but it captures most of what makes the anime's world so captivating.

Attack on Titan: Humanity in Chains is not a bad game; however, it's really far from becoming the game that the fans could wish for. It's really easy to learn the basic controls, and the movement mechanics is really something else, but apart from that it becomes so repetitive and lacks any really replay value.

As I said at the beginning, I feel like this game could have been so much more. The same attack patterns and methods for killing titans wears thin pretty quickly, which is a shame because the World Mode can be so much fun.

Attack on Titan: Humanity in Chains has some good ideas in its robust World Mode, but monotonous gameplay and a half-hearted Story Mode lessen its overall value.

It feels like Spike Chunsoft was either too eager to cash in on the Attack on Titan fever sweeping the globe or too scared to stray from the events of the show to take any real chances on this game. Whatever the reason, Attack on Titan: Humanity in Chains is a beat-for-beat replica of the source material that somehow misses the action, suspense and tenacity that define the anime and manga.

Some of its shortcomings are due to limitations placed by the story or the system hardware, but although the Attack on Titan formula isn't exactly designed for gaming, Humanity in Chains is a solid attempt at it.

Humanity in Chains is a game that was made for Attack on Titan fans. It’s fun, visually stunning, immersive, and it’s essentially an entire anime made into a video game.

It’s evident after playing through Humanity in Chains that the developers at Spike Chunsoft understand the world of Attack on Titan. They just weren’t successful in creating a fun game based around it.

A very poor attempt to bring the great original manganime saga to 3DS. Lackluster in global.

While the idea of bringing down behemoths is always a good one, the way Spike Chunsoft executes it is very flawed, to the point that it gets old after an hour in. Even the promise of online multiplayer isn't enough to fix the big problems on display here. Watch the TV series instead.

While it was nice to get some freedom with the Omni-Directional Maneuver gear and to play with some new items in World Mode, the missions bogged down the fun.

Humanity in Chains' gameplay is obviously uninspired and riddled with poor design choices.

Attack on Titan: Humanity in Chains is further proof that the seemingly obvious genre for an anime-to-game adaptation isn't always the best one.

A passable game only recommended for people who really loved the anime or manga and are starving for a game.

In the end, Attack on Titan: Humanity in Chains is precisely the kind of Anime game that many expected it to be: a quick and uninspired cash-in that tries to utilize its source material to hide the boring and sparse gameplay within.

Everything adds up to a rushed project that demonstrates promise early on, but quickly yields to typical licensed game rubbish. [Issue #16 – July/August 2015, p.25]

Attack on Titan contains the premise for an amazing video game, but never delivers on this potential. With their overly literal interpretation of the source material, Spike Chunsoft really limited what they could do with their adaptation, leading to an incredible amount of repetition.

My initial expectation was that it would be similar to Sword Art Online: Hollow Fragment for the PlayStation Vita – a mediocre-to-decent game based on an anime franchise that sells a boatload at $40 and is only available digitally. What I got is something that you should have no business playing, and I look forward to reclaiming over 12,000 blocks of 3DS memory very soon.

This game is the epitome of the phrase ‘one-trick pony.' There's just nothing here. The hardest-core fans may want to dip in as a way to reminisce, but I'm guessing even those fans would be hard-pressed to find much value. If nothing else, I will say that the game made me want to watch the series, so that's something, I guess.

There is so little original content in Attack on Titan: Humanity in Chains that its full retail price feels like robbery.