Oddworld: Soulstorm Oddtimized Edition Review

I am by no means an aficionado of the franchise nor would I even pretend to be. Oddworld, despite being something that I would occasionally catch a glimpse of from time to time which if I were to even put it into context is as often as I get guilt-tripped by my partner that I spend more time checking out game stores instead of bringing her out to dinner… but no matter how many times it really is, and who the frick is even counting, the intrigue in the title never really bore fruit into picking it up for takeaway until now. Was it a terrible idea to get into it this late? Who knows…

Abe?! Abe… brief history to where it all started

But before we even get down and dirty with the nitty-gritty of what Soulstorm has in store for us, my visit with good ol’ Google got me caught up with most of the questions I had after starting this odd-venture. For starters, the game starts you off scratching your head, figuratively and quite literally, as it throws you off in the opening sequence thinking who the hell is Abe and why does everyone kept shouting his name? And apparently, unlike most modern game sequels nowadays, Oddworld is a game you’d have a much better time understanding should you have played the prequel. Who would’ve thought right?

And for the sake of filling up this article of words without it being filled with more questions than answers, let’s break the series down a bit. Oddworld was originally planned as a pentalogy however as fate would have it, the series was halted to redirect its efforts elsewhere. Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee is the beginning of the series, bringing Abe, a happy yet ignorant worker at RuptureFarms which is a meat-packing plant. However the said plant’s boss Mollock the Glukkon plans to turn the factory’s Mudokon slaves, your species, into a source of meat and at some point in time, as most protagonists would, well I guess you’d already know what’s about to happen so I’ll stop there to avoid any more spoilers. Meanwhile Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus begins where Oddysee ends and not long after that, we get Oddworld: Munch’s Oddyssee. But fast forward to 2014, 17 years since the first one came out, Oddworld: New ‘n’ Tasty brings back a full remake of Abe’s Oddysee while 2021’s Oddworld: Soulstorm breaks the sequence because instead of a remake of Abe’s Exoddus, it reimagines the sequel where the Glukkons, the principal enemies of the series, is now out for revenge for what happened back at the plant.

A unique platformer marred by issues to see success in the modern era

The Oddworld series unlike most platformers that came out in recent years brings methodical and slower-paced encounters at its core gameplay roots. You’re not going to breeze through sections of the map zipping up and down, left or right while trying to get the most exhilarating experience with pixel-perfect precision. No, instead, the bread and butter to its core mechanics revolve around working your way through enemies and traps with various crafted items and unique tools whether that unique tool just revolves around you tiptoeing ever so slowly towards sleeping enemies to tie them down or disarming mines with a perfectly timed slap with your bare hands that could potentially and will most definitely kill you the first few dozens of times. This is where Oddworld shines and breaks apart too… because unlike just having an agile assassin zip through the screen and take down enemies with quick and efficient slashes, Oddworld’s mechanics make the game unwieldy and clunky at certain times. One such instance is lobbing bottles to either put off fires or to start one, at times, putting out a fire is easier said than done when lobbing a bottle would often take a couple of tries when it fails to put it out despite being in the general area where the bottle was thrown.

Meanwhile, slap mines are probably one of my worst enemies in the early levels of the game just the fact that the margin of error is pretty slim even for someone like myself that at the very least has gone through multiple titles from the music rhythm genre. It doesn’t help either that dying to a section restarts you back to when you first touched the checkpoints which in turn, forces you to refill your pockets with stuff like water bottles or traps present in that section of the map. However, Abe despite not having the skill to strike down foes like a badass, makes up with his arsenal of tools and sacred powers to even control his enemies to fight each other before blowing them up once the deed is done. This helps alleviate problematic areas where you’d potentially be slapping mines all day but instead just forcefully make them blow up with the bodies of your own enemies although there are also some restrictions to this as some areas disable your powers forcing you to try different means to resolve them. One other key feature of the series is gaining followers and unlike Social Media followers, these are something that you can order around to help you solve puzzles once you find them scattered throughout the hidden areas of each level.

And visually, it’s not a particularly good-looking game outside its cinematic sequences nor is it a completely bad one. While you can find yourself glued to all the finer details of Abe and the gang during a cinematic, once you’re at the helm of this whole wacky adventure, it drops it down a bit in the quality in some cases where some of the areas are bland, washed out and splashed with just nearly the same coat of paint making it less appealing to play when the discrepancy from the cinematic and the graphics is incomparable. Paired with its issues like enemies getting stuck in the walls at one point in time or the fact that after dying, Abe respawned at a checkpoint like normal but instead of being able to continue the level, he was stuck in place preventing progress even if you restart from the checkpoint. Though returning to the main menu and going back to the checkpoint again did the trick but for a game to even have this kind of problem especially when deaths are aplenty, it definitely questions the Oddtimized Edition’s touch-up from last year’s version which supposedly tried to fix most issues the vanilla Soulstorm had.

Conclusion

Oddworld: Soulstorm despite having the Oddtimized Edition slapped onto it never really felt like a game that fits the modern era and while it does have a few notable designs and quirks on how it works and plays, the clunky controls especially with the movement and aiming definitely hurts its potential success among a few others that it could’ve tried to make better. Its story despite my feeling lost at what Abe is or why he became such a central figure to its narrative, provides this unique charm that kind of makes you want to continue more and more. In many regards, it has its flaws and weaknesses but the adventure should you try to trek it puts you in unique situations that almost never feels like a song on repeat with how much it introduces new mechanics to keep it interesting yet challenging.

Grab your copy here https://www.nintendo.co.uk/Games/Nintendo-Switch-games/ODDWORLD-SOULSTORM-2283581.html

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