Odium
PREVIEW
Published By: Monolith

Reviewed by _fo0k
9/30/99

Odium, by Monolith, is an up and coming rpg/strategy game. If you've ever seen "Aliens" you'll be familiar with the premise... Military man Cole Sullivan is the hero, and it is your job to send him and his two soldier buddies into the heart of the demon's (or in this case, aliens) lair. Some sort of mysterious, hush hush government facility has gone horribly awry. The first group of four soldiers sent in, of course, were never heard from again, so your mission is to find any traces of them, survivors on the facility, and secure it, against the screaming hordes of technologically superior baddies.

Odium could be a pretty interesting title. Although the game isn't going too far out in any bold new directions (from what I've seen in the beta version I was given), it does utilize current technologies well. Exploration is done in real time, with a simple inventory system and a "click here to get this" interface. The characters are premade, prenamed, and do a lot of cutscene narrative in between the action. Although there are many elements of an RPG in this game, such as the skill progression/experience system, I wouldn't call this a true rpg since I'm not allowed to make my own character.

Combat is turn based, and handled pretty much in the same manner as Fallout... you move so many spaces per turn, attack with your weapon, or heal up after taking some punishment from a baddie. One of the things I hope they plan on refining from this beta is the viewable area... the screen scrolls around your active character and allows you to point the mouse to the edge of the screen to scroll off, but they almost shouldn't have bothered, because you can only scroll another couple of steps off screen before it abruptly stops you. This might be their conception of your range of vision, but that doesn't quite work properly either, because I can see the back side of buildings that are on the screen. In my opinion, they should make up their mind and either let me scroll off enough to see a reasonable amount of the surrounding area, or not at all. We will see how they plan on addressing this issue in the final version.

On my brief stint into the near future, I managed to find two dead members of the previous group before my main character (Cole) was killed (causing my game to end). I tried again.. this time guarding him to the expense of the others in my group. I picked up a 4th character (a russian who was hiding in the ruins) and made a pretty good run of it. My last encounter was with two big alien baddies, who were intent on destroying "the singing mutant". Unfortunately for me, once they killed this guy, my game ended again. Well, it is after all a beta. I'll have to give this another run or two and see if I can find any cool future blasters or at least enough ammo to keep defending myself from those pesky aliens. I'll say it is a little addictive (I'm curious to see where the story goes) and will probably be an entertaining product.