Omikron: The Nomad Soul

First the positive, Omikron does give you a huge world that you can play around in. The graphics for the people and places are pretty good. The general story line is pretty good, enough to keep you interested for a while. The sound is excellent. That's about it for the good.

The Bad:

The Controls: Nothing good can come from having to set your movement controls for four different gaming situations (Exploring, Swimming, First person shooter, and hand to hand combat). If you don't mind the default settings this won't be a problem for you. If you do, you have to go in and change the controls for different situations independently.

The Graphics: Althought visually stunning, they are not so good unless you do the 1.6 M install, if you don't everything you do the game has to read from the CD kind of slows down the whole gaming experience. If you don't have the best in equiptment expect slow downs anyways. I'm also not exactly sure what the people at Quantic Dream deemed it necessary when they enveloved the entire game in a fog. It detracts from the gameplay because you can never find anything unless your standing in front of it.

The Gameplay: The puzzles in Omnikron are not that difficult to figure out, and they seem to rehash the same puzzles again under a different premise. Once you solved it the first time the subsequent times are just tedious (Actually the whole puzzle solving part of this game is tedious. It doesn't really involve all that much thinking it's more you have to run around and find the components which are sometimes obvious and other time just plain obscure or hard to read). You will also spend an inordinately large amount of time just running from place to place. The world is just to big sometimes. If you forgot something or need something from storage, it gets frustrating when you spend 10 mins having to run to the closest terminal to extract it. The biggest frustration in the whole game is you don't always know what your suppose to be doing. Other adventure games always give you a sense of what your suppose to be doing next. Omikron fails to do that several times and this is enough to get you to start cursing the day you bought this game. The game seems to have an agenda of its own and neglects to tell let you in on it. This is just bad game design.

The first person shooter: It's like playing a beautiful Commodore 64 (computer from the 80's) game. Not much challenge and enemies seem to have the ability to appear wherever they want.

The hand to hand combat: Remember the Original Street Fighter game this is even worse.

The final bad: Bugs lots of them everywhere.

Try this game at your own risk.

Ok, I'll admit i was suckered into buying this game just because Bowie was in it. I am still, however, a hardcore gamer. I've spent plenty of hours on Everquest, Tribes, Quake 3, Starcraft and plenty of others. So I know a quality game when I see one.

We'll start with graphics. First off, you need to be running a very high end machine for this game to look decent. I'm running a 'pitiful' P2 450 w/ 256 megs RAM, and a Voodoo 3 2000, and I needed to set the game to 800 x 600 with all the detail levels at medium for this game to have a tolerable framerate. I can run Quake 3 at 1024 x 768 and almost maximum settings, and its by far a much better looking game anyways.

And this MUCH HYPED facial moting capture? Its AWESOME, BUT THE PEOPLE DONT $#$%# BLINK! Thus shatters the illusion of emotion, as all the characters stare at you creepily like retarded zombies. Come on, how the heck did Quantic Dream miss that? Plug in your old Nintendo and you'll see that even the original Super mario Brother blinked! Cripes.

The setting is well done, if not original. Sort of 5th Element meets Dune. The plot is obscure at first and there's little to get you interested. it does get better, but there's one main problem. . .

the play mechanics suck BIG TIME in all modes of play! This is typical of games that try to cover too many areas. Rather than excell in one singular aspect (like Quake 3, Tribes or EverQuest) it spreads itself very thin and comes out mediocre at best.

the First Person shooting is choppy, the weapons are unispired and slow to fire, enemies appear out of thin air (probably due to some bug) and you are forced to rely too heavily on med-kits.

The fighting engine is also weak. Its especially difficult to play with the mouse and keyboard combo, not to mention the fact that its boring and usually fights are tossed in hap-hazardly to culminate a first person shooting round. I would have preferred that this was just left out and the FPS tweaked, but oh well, what do I know, I'm just the consumer.

So with all this frustration, tis a chore just to continue in the game. not to mention the fact that your objective is very damn obscure at first and you'll spend most of your time walking around aimlesly.

And then there were BUGS. And plenty of them. Certain commands like walking or crouching dont work when applyed to certain buttons. No particular reason it seems. For instance, I set walking to left shift, as almost all FPS players will do, and I use the WSAD running / strafing system. Forget it, cause that will cause a ton of problems. Instead of using the up arrow when at the game menu, you need to use the 'w' key because the game is too stupid to know when its playing and when its not. You cant us the 's' key in your name if you've done this either, because it takes you back to the menu. Sucks if your name is Scott. There's plenty of other bugs too, but'll lets not spoil ALL the surprises.

As for Bowie's 'gametrack', dont buy this game if you own his new album, 'Hours. . ' because thats all it is. Really. he doesnt supply the ambient sound as I had hoped he would, and the only time you get to hear his songs is at a bar where some badly animated singer jerks around like a puppet while Bowie's music is dubbed over. Sure the songs are great but by the album, its cheaper. The ambient sound is still good, but it skips, a LOT. So it gives you a headache most of the time.

As for the game, if you want depth, by Everquest. if you don't like D&D go the Final Fantasy 8 route. if you want shooting, by Quake 3 Arena or better yet Tribes. If Omikron only runs half decent on your computer these games will look amazing. if you want fighting buy Tekken 3 and see how it's SUPPOSED to be done. Avoid this Eidos cash-machine like the plague.