Thursday 20 April 2017

Oddworld New N Tasty (Xbox One)

Dark, depressing and scary. Such is the life for the Mudokons at Rupture Farms, and it's about to get a whole lot worse. Forced to live in fear as they clean up the food factory, now their own employers (or captors) are planning to turn them into their latest food product. Abe, skulking outside the corporate meeting as they plan the new tasty treat, is forced to get the Hell out of there before he ends up in someone's stomach.

Originally called Abe's Oddysee, a PS1 classic. For those who played the original back in 1997 will see a complete overhaul in graphics, making this 2014 release look like a current game. A 3D side-scrolling, puzzle game is how to describe it. Requiring a lot of trial and error to solves puzzles. The objective is to return to Rupture Farms and save as many Mudokons as possible. While navigating around, you're often presented with a board, indicating how many Mudokons you've saved, lost and how many are left. It's a great way to see if you've had any casualties, so you can try and go back to save them. You'd use the D-pad to command the Mudokons, you could say hi to get their attention, you could also tell them to follow you and wait. You'd have to lead them through enemies and traps to the safe portals you'd channel, then all fellow Mudokons would jump through to safety.

It's a great story of an unlikely hero, depending on how many Mudokons you save, you can have a different ending. I love the unique characters, I love the Mudokons, they are hilarious and have their own dialect, as do the Sligs, the guards of Rupture Farms. There are more unique enemies too, and each has their own abilities and specific ways to take care of them. You can even mind control some enemies and take them out by making them kill each other. Some enemies you could distract with meat or rocks, and some wouldn't attack unless there was more than one or they were backed into a corner by you.

One of the best features was the quick save, as well as the quick load. It really was... well, quick. If you messed up and died, you could instantly just quick load the last save to avoid watching the respawn animation. I milked the quick save and chose to save at any opportunity I felt I'd mess up on. Elum was a cool rideable, he didn't feature too much, but he was really fun. He ran so fast and it could be quite difficult to time the jumps, but it was so thrilling riding so fast and making difficult jumps at the same time. Password puzzles were unique too, using the dialect speak, you would have to copy the Mudokons in order to get passed. The Sligs also had doors which you would need to use their dialect for, another cool thing was the Sligs could command the dogs to attack other Sligs, one of many unique ways to dispatch of enemies.

I love this world, the characters and the humour. I can't wait to play more of the Oddworld games, and this is a great place to start for any new fans. There's plenty of reason to go back to it too, different endings, saving more Mudokons, getting better times. It can be quite frustrating having to redo parts over and over until you finally do it, but that's part of the fun and it feels great when you get past that one part you struggled on. My only wish is that it wasn't so short.

7.1/10


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