Unlike console systems, the personal computer does not have an overflowing RPG genre. And what relatively few RPGs are available for the PC are almost always Yet Another High Fantasy Game. Bleah.
Then again, an overwhelming number of console RPGs are high fantasy, too, but at least console RPG makers experiment with other genres more than once every 20 years. Of course, the seminal Fallout series was a PC outing, but can anyone name me anything else from the non-FRPG genre? Vampire: the Masquerade: Redemption? No, Final Fantasy VII and VIII don't count. Incubation?
Is that it?
So I can remember being very excited when I first saw Odium. Tactical combat! RPG elements! And it isn't high fantasy! Excellent!
Well, this game had a lot going for it. I'll give it that much.
To start with, the premise - as we've already been over - isn't high fantasy. Instead, you're a team of near-future soldiers investigating a town in Poland, ruined by the result of mysterious experiment gone (of course) catastrophically wrong. Intriguing.
Strong point two is the excellent soundtrack. Usually, the game is silent - usually when you're poking around the ruins, investigating. Now, in most games, silence is extremely boring, but not here. In Odium, it's creepy and effective. You never forget that you're in a dead, obliterated city where evolution knows what has happened.
Until you get ambushed by something and combat begins. Then we hear the music, and it's great. There's one theme I thought was particularly awesome - not only did it sound cool, but it perfectly fit the despair and menace of the heroes' situation. The music, overall, is nearly as well-done as the graphics.
And speaking of those, there we score another point. Odium's graphics people really put in a lot of effort, and it shows. The totally wrecked city looks only slightly more cheerful than the future scenes in the Terminator movies, and is quite convincing. The characters are well-animated. The obligatory, seemingly limitless supply of monsters you encounter are weird, biomechanical terrors and look appropriately menacing, only occasionally faltering into the realm of dumb absurdity.
Last up is the wonderful interface. Learning to control every part of this game was refreshingly easy, but it must be mentioned above all how Odium is layered over an adventure game model. In other words, you collect items, which you need to solve various puzzles to get to various locations. Ordinarily, I would moan to high hell about this - adventure game designers are infamous for disregarding any real logic when creating their puzzles, leading to many hours of random item-using frustration before the poor player finally figures out the poorly-conceived solution. A wonderful example of this is Sierra's excruciating Rama, which I also reviewed elsewhere a long time ago. In fact, this very Odium review is a more fleshed-out version of another Odium review I wrote at that time, too, but never mind.
Anyway, in Odium, you automatically use your items whenever you get to the right place to use them. You don't even get the "option" of trying any other item. Wow...you mean it isn't going to make me screw around for aeons trying every random item and finally figuring out that I missed picking up the one I need? Excellent.
Of course, reading this far, you might think I actually liked this game overall, or that it's worth getting, or some other such crap.
Ohhhhhh, no.
Did I say this game had a lot of things going for it? Oh, yes I did. Sadly, these good things are outweighed by the bad, and how!
Dialogue. Odium's conversations, characterization, and everything thereof are just whacked. The voice acting wasn't great, but my main problem is consistency. You might have one encounter where the heroes will see monsters and whine "AUGH! WHAT THE HELL IS THAT?!" Then they'll have another encounter where more monsters appear and your lead soldier will nonchalantly go "Watch out, those are bigger than the others", and someone else will sarcastically reply "Right, boss."
The premise. As stated before, this was great...until you realize you're three soldiers...going into a whole city...with monsters roughly every ten feet.
Normally, no problem. Not even slightly. How many trillions of CRPGs have we had where the heroes have single-handedly fought back quadrillions of monsters over the course of their noble quests? And anyway, this being a CRPG, it's not like our heroes can't take three or four good chaingun bursts or disembowlings from the monsters before biting it anyway. And even if it threatens to come to that, some good old bandages and adhesive tape will get you right back to perfect health. Yes, sir, this is a real man's army.
No, the problem with your characters taking on the whole city is they have maybe 20 bullets apiece.
Military intelligence, anyone?
Not that the bullet situation gets any better as you progress through the city - bullets are so sparingly found that you might have to reload to earlier combats, just because you didn't save enough of them to win worse encounters later on.
It would have helped if your starting guns weren't even less realistic than the previously mentioned chainguns. The first - and practically the weakest - monster you'll run into at the start of the game has 40 hit points. Your characters have around 120. Your rifles do maybe 15 damage on a good hit.
Your rifles. The other half of your bullets are for your pistols, a vastly more pathetic weapon.
Did I mention that 40 hit points is the WEAK end of the monster scale? And that there are NOT that many bullets?
But now, anyway, we're at the central flaw of Odium - combat. I can't begin to imagine what they were thinking, but whoever programmed the combat in this game could profit from a serious beating.
At first, from the whole "tactical combat RPG" angle, I was expecting Odium's combat to be like the first X-COM game. See, what was neat about that game is that it actually made an attempt at realism. Not only could bullets and other weapons actually kill unarmored (and often even armored) soldiers with one hit, but you could fire at any target your soldier could see.
Reasonable, right? Seems like the whole "I can shoot at anything I can see" would be a given for games like this, right?
Ohhhhhhh, no. Oh, god, no.
In Odium, you can only fire your pistol in four directions - not diagonally. That's right...if a monster is standing on a diagonal square right fricking next to you, you can't shoot it. Worse, your pistol's already pathetic stopping power mysteriously drops off after about 15 or 20 feet.
Rifles are slightly better. They allow you to fire diagonally, but still only in a straight line. Which still leaves gaping holes in your field of vision that you can't attack.
Combine these asinine attack rules with your pathetic weapons and lack of bullets, and the result is a combat model so insipid I soon lost any interest in finishing the game.
Did I also mention that the game ends if even one of your characters dies? Even if the dead character is just some seemingly random survivor/civilian you picked up along the way?
Like I said before: what were they thinking?!
I refuse to believe they couldn't have programmed in better line of sight rules. Games far more complex (gameplay-wise, if not graphically) featured more realistic lines of sight years ago. Since you have to waste so much effort and movement "getting into position", maybe the programmers just did it to make the game harder. I guess, then, they couldn't figure out anything so simple as "adjustable difficulty levels".
No, I think we're gonna have to chalk this one up to sheer malevolence.
In closing, I'm not saying that Odium was a completely worthless game. It's certainly atmospheric (until one of the characters opens their mouth), and if you can endure the grotesque absurdities of the combat system, it's all right. It's just that this could easily have been so much more than yet another triumph of graphics over gameplay.
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