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Hi all, I'm going to do a game review today. Because, well, I've never done it before, and this is the game I'm playing when I get really bored at home.



Oni is not like most 3rd person shooters (tps). While most of these shooting games revolve around guns and weapons, Oni is based on hand-to-hand combat. To dissuade the player from relying on his or her weapons too much, they've limited the ammo allowed per gun. This does force the player to perfect hand and feet in close fighting, but it doesn't make much real sense. Here is the first real problem.

You can pick up an enemy's gun, and fire it at the baddies. You can also find ammo clips and reload a gun. However, you cannot take a dropped weapon, remove the ammo, and use it with your existing weapon. What?? It'd be okay if all the guns were energy based, at least you have an excuse for it being non-removeable. But there are machine guns that obviously fire bullets, so it gets me upset when I can't remove a gun with a little ammo to add to my existing clip.

Another peeve about the weapons is that if you have 3 shots left in your weapon, and you reload a cartridge, your 3 shots that were left has now disappeared. That is, if your weapon holds 6 shots, and you have 3 left, while you have one more cartridge (presumably holding 6 shots) then you don't get a total of 6 shots plus half a clip.... you only get 6 shots. Period. Umm... excuse me, where did my other bullets magically disappear to? This is a bad thing if you accidently reload the weapon if you didn't want to.

Reloading a weapon is as easy as pressing a key. However, your character will reload her weapon when she has a spare clip, and the existing gun is empty. While this normally is a good thing, it is the second big problem with the game. You see, to simpify the weapon system, there are only 2 types of ammo. Green and red. I've encountered at least 8 different weapons, all doing different damages, and sometimes I want to save a clip for another gun. In the heat of the battle, you sometimes forget to check how many shots you have left. If you attempt to fire a shot when there's nothing in the gun, it will reload itself. This hinders the strategic use of the various weapons involved, as you run out of ammo if you're trigger happy, or you panic.

You are limited to carrying only 1 weapon. This is okay, afterall the game is based on hand-to-hand combat. One thing that puzzles me is where does the main character store her bigger weapons, like the multi-missile launcher, or even just the plasma rifle? I wish they had her strapping it to her back commando style, that would be cool. You could at one glance know exactly what she was packing. Instead, she take the gun, and shoves it in her jacket.... yes, even the bulky rocket launcher. Nothing game breaking, just not realistic.

What's worse is that if you drop the gun on the ground, after a minute or so, it just disappears for no reason. Well, it's not for no reason. Again it forces the player to punch and kick their way out of a bad situation. Maybe the gun disappears to where the bullets went when you reload into a non empty clip! The corpses don't decompose, why should the hardware?

Graphically speaking, the combat animation is extremely smooth. There are combos to be done based on the sequence of mouse clicks. Left click for punch, right click for Kick. So a L, L, R will be punch, punch, kick. L, L, L, will be ..... well you know. In that sense, the animation flows together really well. There's no lag between fighting stances. It's impressive.

Less impressive is the mouse sensitivity. One of the cool thing about Oni is that each weapon held dictates how slow you can move or turn. That means the bigger the weapon, the slower you can pan around the screen. This is a really nifty idea, as is when your weapon is drawn, you cannot run quickly. This again tries to discourage weapon based fighting, but the mouse look is excruciatingly laggy. So much so that even when you're just running around, it's hard to turn quick enough to face an opponent from behind.

Another big fault are theassignment of the control keys. As in, you can't change the keyboard mappings at all! Okay, this isn't totally true. There's a Text file in the game's folder which allows you to edit and set the keys manually, but come on! How 1990 is that?! There are a 101 keys on the modern US keyboard, let us play the way we want.

The AI is competitive, and are not to be triffled with. There aren't any stupid tricks that will work on the AI baddies everytime. Because of this, the game can be very tough. In this day and age of the hustle and bustle, it is impossible (at least for me) to invest in long periods of time on a video game. So, at most I can only sit there for a half hour at a time playing. This means that the game is very dumb. There are no options to save at any time. Instead, the computer decides when you can save, and where. There aren't even any waypoints to find; you'll walk into a room, or hit a key spot, and a little message will flash "Game Saved". The thing that bugs me the most is when you open a door, see baddies rushing you, and you step back to fight. Let's say you're low on health and you die. So, you have to start the level all over again, this in itself is pure fustration. What makes me pull out my hair is when I repeat the sequence, I find out that if I had stepped through the doorway earlier, instead of backing up, I would have saved the game where it was, and I wouldn't have to restart all over. The coup de gras is when you're forced to save the game, with a sliver of health, and there's no way to kill 3 tough AI enemies. It's just stupid. At least show us where we can save, so we can have the option of saving right away, or after a fight.

As I said earlier, the character animations are excellent. However, the rest of the game was written in 1998. You can so tell, because the buildings and other objects lack any textures. If you only concentrate on the back of the character, you're fine. If you look around and do some sight seeing, you're greeted with boring flat, dark walls and ceilings. It's almost like the developers didn't care about the rest of the environment, as long as the main character's suit had a nice metallic sheen to it, they're more than happy. Also, the world is as round as a T-square. Everything is angled and blocky, not one building/room had any kind of curve to it. Oh joy, another big dumb block in a factory. More crates please.

Are there good things about the game? Yes, the hand-to-hand combat is extremely rewarding. However, it isn't without fault either. The game has some set throws that you can perform, but it's not smart enough to realize when you're close to the edge of a cliff or the top of the building. For example, there's a throw where as you hop over the baddie, you reach behind and throw him in front of you. This is normally a very good move, however, if you're close to the said cliff/building top, you will throw him, and then fal over the edge, and die. Since various throws are distance/time sensitive, you really have no way of selecting what throws to use at any given time. This makes the game more even more fustrating.

The gameplay is extremely repetitive too. All puzzle solving revolves around finding a computer terminal that will: A) turn something off, B) turn something on, or C) open a lock door. Oh joy be praised! That's is like the most innovative game element since..... oh I dunno, beating your head against a concrete wall just because it feels so good when you finally stop. I wait three years for this game, and I'm rewarded with hunt for the door lock?

All in all, the game is not worth playing. Adding to the fact that the storyline is pretty basic fluff of betrayal and revenge. You against the world type deal. Yawn.

The only saving grace for this game may be the music, which is fresh and fits the mood of the game for the first 10 minutes. Then you realize that like most techo music, it just repeats itself, over and over and over again, until you get mad enough to turn off the speakers. Voice acting is bad, all the characters in the game uses ventriloquism, and there's really no reason to pay attention to the story.

The game is so linear, you don't need to read the in game misison objectives. There's only 1 or 2 paths at most that will lead you the your objective. And it doesn't matter what you choose, you'll still have to turn off the switch, or fight a boss character eventually.

Let's recap-

Good: Smooth animation, nice hand fighting engine, enemies/hero model nicely rendered.
Average: music, variation in guns
Bad: too many to list. Lack of use of weapons and no save game feature at the top of the heap.

This is what I recommend: Borrow the game from a friend, install it, have fun with the combat for about 10 minutes, realize the game just isn't good enough to bother, and delete it. Then read the game walkthrough and see how it ends. It's much more satisfying this way.

...3/10. You could do worse, but not much.

posted by losir at 9:33 PM