Retro Review: Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath

Grade: A-
Time Spent Playing: 8 - 10 hours

Stop what you're doing. Grab a belt. Walk to a mirror. Pull your pants down. Start flogging yourself while you recite, "I'm a dirty little slut bitch." Don't feel too ashamed, because I'm right there with you, bruised ass and tears streaming.

Our crime? Ignoring Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath when it dropped three years ago. Sure, we can blame Microsoft Studios for drop kicking Lorne and company when they showed up late with a game they weren't supposed to be making. Or we can pin the onus on EA for picking up the game with the express purpose of making a sizable equipment donation to the mini-frisbee championship of the world.

But we all knew about this game. We knew it was coming. We knew Oddworld Inhabitants made good games. And for whatever reason, we shunned it. Probably because we're assholes.



Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath tells the story of Stranger, a lion-goat-thingy bounty hunter that's desperately trying to earn 20K to pay for a mysterious, life-saving surgery. It has pretty much no connection with any of the other games, except that it takes place on Oddworld, albeit on a heretofore unseen part of it and the bad guys, predictably, are corporate mooks. Unlike the industrial-nightmare backdrop of previous games, Stranger's world is directly inspired the frontier west of North America. And what a lush, beautiful representation of that forgotten country it is.



The graphics may be the absolute best the Xbox ever produced. The models are highly detailed and are clearly the result of hours of love and thoughtful design while the surroundings beckon you to explore by their beauty alone. It truly would have been an aesthetic crime if EA had succeeded in forcing the devs to make a PS2 version. I imagine it would be something akin to the way Don Swayze looks like his brother Patrick Swayze; there's a resemblance, but it's a retarded resemblance.

Of special note is that there is very, very little loading. Journeying from region to region is seamless.




The gameplay is a peculiar mixture of third-person platforming and first-person shooting. In platformer mode, you run faster and have longer jumps and can wallop enemies with headbutts and tornado punches. First-person allows you use of the crossbow, which, instead of arrows, fires different little creatures that vary in purpose and strength. I can see why the big publishers likely held this game pinched between their thumb and pointer fingers, holding their noses with their free hand. I'm an experienced gamer--one eager to play this game--and it took me a while to really get into the flow of switching between the two. Even after having beat it, I wonder if the game wouldn't have been better served by keeping all of the action in third-person. Perhaps, instead of switching to first-person, clicking the right stick could have allowed an over-over-the-shoulder view with strafing controls.




The flow of the game, at least the first two-thirds or so of it, is similar to that of Shadow of the Collossus. You're presented with a large, continuous world--though more limited than Colossus--where you hunt down bosses who are essentially gameplay puzzles. On the way to bosses you have to take out scores of lesser bandits and explore the area for gold and ammo. To collect a bounty on those bandits and bosses, you suck defeated enemies up ghostbusters style. You're rewarded with more moolah for live enemies, which in turn adds a nice level of difficulty for people like me who simply can't deal with the possibility there might be some power up or upgrade that I'll not be able to afford. The last third of the game is much more linear as larger events push the story forward.

Speaking of the story; it's what you should expect of Lorne Lanning. Industrialists are inherently evil and people stuck in the stone age--sorry, people who live in harmony with nature--are, by default, good. Someday, I'd like for Lorne Lanning to explain how exactly we could have things like computers and aeroplanes and vaccines for deadly diseases without the wealth and technology brought on by the industrial revolution. But whatever. In all likelihood, most players won't care and unlike another preachy game, it never detracts from the experience. Outside of the message angle, the story is pretty straight forward. There is a major twist two-thirds in that, upon further reflection, doesn't make much sense even though you'll likely see it coming. There's a final twist at the very end that actually makes no sense whatsoever.

I will contend, however, that Stranger is a likable and interesting character. What he was willing to do to himself was poignantly sad and in the end, I'm not so sure he cared for the plight of the natives. He seemed more motivated by killing the guy who put a huge bounty on his head than with helping the natives win back their land. I could be wrong about that, but given this supposed to be a western, a genre known for morally ambiguous heroes, I don't think I'm stretching


The caveats:

Much like another great but under performing Xbox game developed by an ace adventure game designer, certain faults betray the inexperience of its creators with an unfamiliar genre. The difficulty can be quite erratic and the enemies are all perfect shots; the automatic-weapon wielding baddies will bullseye you from vast distances while snipers will hit you even at full gallop. Some of the bosses will induce hair pulling, while the final boss is ridiculously easy.

Remember where I mentioned sucking up enemies? That's how you'll die 90% of the time because the bad guys love shooting you when you do it. And because they only stay unconscious for about five seconds, you often have to resort to trying to capture them in the middle of firefights. Taking on a group of six enemies can be annoying, often requiring you to fall back and snare them as they follow you one by one.

A final buggaboo: I took great care to capture all of my main bounties and the vast majority of the henchmen alive and there is little reward for it. The aforementioned story twist makes all of the money you made worthless and I'm convinced I could have afforded all of the powerups had I killed everyone. Nor is there a special ending for going out of your way to save lives.

But even given those complaints, this is an excellent game. The game world realized is beyond what most developers are even striving for. It's a shame this put Oddworld Inhabitants out of the game business.