Odium (Gorky 17)

Once upon a time I played the demo of this game. It enticed some interest back then, mainly because of its good graphics, but was not all too successfull because of gameplay issues.

Odium is an RPG, but not a conventional one. There is no character creation and little choice in character development. Combat is turn-based and hampered by silly limitations: most guns can only shoot in four directions! As soon as one of your party dies, the game is over.

Odium was no big hit, but it was ported to Macintosh and Linux in later years. An Amiga port was in development, but seems not to have been finished.

Reviews and Links

• There certainly was enough content in Odium to inspire me to play through to the end, Chris Harding said (review offline):

  I wanted to see what enemies and weapons were housed around the next horrific corner. I also enjoyed the narrative and thought Metropolis did a nice job with a slightly overused setting. In the end, the good outweighs the bad. It offers a unique style of play, and combines elements from popular titles in a way that's never been done before. It also has a pretty good storyline, nice graphics, very cool weapons and interesting monsters. While far too combat focused and very linear in its adventuring aspects, I enjoyed its approach. If you don't mind a lot of turn-based fighting and like your narratives dark and apocalyptic, Odium is a winner.

• It's a gorgeous looking game all the way through, Wolf says, but of course it doesn’t come without its gripes:

  Odium (Gorky 17) suffers from a severe case of being rather short. Now of course as a reviewer I play through these things perhaps a bit quicker than your average gamer, but it's still gonna be short. The whole thing, the beautifully constructed backgrounds and all these nice big bad guys, the introductory cut-scenes and all feel so incredibly tightly compacted together as if they were trying to reach a limit of game playing hours and just had to crunch it all up as much as possible. It is understandable in my opinion, as all the artwork that has gone into the game must have taken ages to make already, the one thing stopping it from being longer is the artwork. But the whole thing feels a bit short-lived, the rather limited variation of guns (just your extremities), the small amount of statistics to upgrade and your limited combat system all give you the feeling of a rather short lived experience.

• Check out some screenshots and buy it!!! Sparkz2005 advises us:

  Music and graphics wise this game is impressive. The graphics are very similar to resident evil, although not amazing by todays standards they are still nice to look at. The music always has that eerie feel to it which is just the type of sounds/music you would expect to hear from a survival game like this. The intense gameplay and constant appeal is ideal for anyone that is into rpg, action, strategy or survival type games. I actually bought the full version myself a few days after playing the demo.