ōdi∙um

The Good
I actually liked this game better than Incubation. The missions felt much less like a puzzle to solve and more like a tactical problem, though the story was at least as intense. The game system gave enough flexibility for meaningful tactical choices, again less artificially constrained. The art was sufficiently dark and spooky to support the story and the desired mood. It was a fine diversion.

The Bad
It was rather short, and not all that replayable. It lacked the overall depth and playtime of XCOM, and it didn't have quite the variety of tactical challenges that either Incubation or XCOM did. Though I liked the game system well enough and better than Incubation, many of my friends did not.

The Bottom Line
A fine, if somewhat short, tactical RPG.

The Good
Odium is a good, solid game. Basically, it's a long series of turn-based battles (like X-COM, only rather more Chess-like). The RPG elements are pretty good, too - You get experience points, go up in levels, and increase your weapon skills the more you use a particular weapon. The battles are generally a lot of fun, and, while not very realistic, do require plenty of strategic thought. There is a wide range of weaponary to find and use, and a wide selection of twisted mutant enemies to use it on.

Perhaps the best thing, though, about this game, is its graphics, which are exquisite. There are loads of different locations, and the painstaking attention to detail in every scene is awesome. The 3D engine is equally fantastic. The character models, animation and lighting effects are very, very impressive.

The Bad
As the game is really just one battle after another, and each one takes quite a long time to play through, I found myself playing this game in short bursts - Only playing through a couple of battles before I felt like I needed a break. When I came back, I always enjoyed it, but the game does become tiresome easily.

While the combat and RPG elements of this game are well done, the adventure elements are very lacking. All you need to do is pick up everything you find, then, when you get to the place where an item is needed, the game will basically tell you what to use. There are only a couple of places in the game which require minor amounts of brainwork.

The script and voice-acting are bad. But that's OK, because the voice-acting is bad enough to be pretty amusing. Despite improvements in stats, your soldiers' characters never actually develop, nor do their relationships with each other, so by the end of the game, you'll still be in charge of the same old trio: Sullivan (tough, angry Canadian), Ovitz (sneering, cynical Polish guy) and Trantigne (wimpy Frenchman). There are plenty of dodgy accents in this game, too.

Any other things to complain about? Not really - Except that the ending is disappointing.

The Bottom Line
Odium is a very playable, high-quality game, with a lot of fun in it. It successfully blends elements of X-COM, Fallout and Alone In The Dark, while having an overall character all of its own. Its graphics are wonderful, and you have to play the game to experience them. However, Odium is not quite good enough to be 'great', and I don't think I'd really want to play through it more than once. That said, I enjoyed it and I'd recommend it to anyone.

The Good
The graphics are excellent. The windows, the items, the background--they all sport high-quality art worth taking a look.

The models aren't detailed, but that could have been intentional to make the game run on slow machines, so it's fine with me.

Other reviewers compare it to Resident Evil for the plot and to X-COM for the combat, but in fact it's more like a turn-based spawn of the Diablo series, with the exception that the characters are done in true 3D and--let's be honest--it comes with a better inventory system.

As in the Diablo series, the music and the sound effect are unique and very effective for the mood.

The game mechanics allow you to do many of the things you wish you could have done on a multiplayer game of Diablo or Diablo II, or a single-player game for that matter.

The Bad
Except for the mutant, the allies you pick on the game are worthless, and all of them either get killed or betray you.

The scoring system is strange to say at least. Each character seems to make points in a different way. Sometimes the one who just killed some minor enemy makes the higher score, and that makes leveling-up dependent on luck rather than strategy.

The game has serious display problems. The read me recommends running it under Mac OS 9 for better hardware acceleration, which wasn't big deal back when it came out because Mac OS X was still new and feature-challenged, and most machines at the time were able to double-boot. But even on Mac OS 9 I couldn't get decent hardware acceleration. Only the main menu looked good--everything else looked pixelated.

The game also has problems playing the cut scenes, and most of the time they were skipped.

My biggest complain, however, is the script system. After being defeated, the first boss is supposed to drop a hand that you need to continue the game. Well, sometimes you got it and sometimes you don't. And after reaching the top of the museum, the characters status got reset somehow and I always ended up in the middle of the game with level one characters!

You may think those things are fixable by cheating, but guess what? The Mac port doesn't have any cheats. What were they thinking?

The Bottom Line
With a buggy port done in a time when Mac OS 9 was being phased out but Mac OS X still wasn't ready to take over, Gorky 17 didn't stood a chance on the Mac platform. It's a shame, because even though the concept behind the game isn't original, it's enjoyable.