Despite their shortcomings, the Oddworld games have always been relatively good fun and PALGN is glad to report that the latest installment in the series, carries on this tradition.
The latest game in the Oddworld series is Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath and follows the adventures of Stranger a mysterious bounty hunter.
PALGN recently had an opportunity to go hands on with the beginning of the game. Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath is exclusive to Xbox and has been picked up by EA for publishing, similar to what they did with Burnout 3 the developers are hoping the publishing power of EA will make Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath a success.
As soon as we loaded up Stranger's Wrath we realized this was a completely different game to its predecessors. Four options are presented to the player at the main menu, New Game, Continue, Load Game and Options.
Naturally, we chose New Game and continued by entering a player name. From the very beginning of the game the atmosphere is just incredibly immersive. After selecting a name a introduction is presented to the player that gives a brief outline of Stranger the character players will be taking control of.
After an extremely captivating introduction players are thrown completely into the mix. A wanted villain has been knocked out and Stranger's role is to capture the bounty and transfer him to the main town.
Bountying enemies is similar to sucking up trash in Blinx. Stranger's voice is heard throughout the level and it is a very dark and sombre. The introduction level does truly serve as a basic tutorial, teaching the player to run, jump, shoot at enemies and change views.
Stranger is a very different character to control in comparison to Munch and Abe as he is heavier and a bit more sluggish. Stranger has the ability to heal himself but this does take off stamina so decisions whether to heal or reserve stamina will need to be made quickly.
We breezed through the tutorial level and were most impressed with the fact that the game didn't seem to be "babying" you through the process. We don't want to go on to much more about the game as we don't want to spoil what happens and a lot of the aspects of the game we want to reserve for our review, but we can honestly say that Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath is a promising game from the very beginning and from what we hear it keeps going until the end.
Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath is released next week alongside the Nintendo DS and Sonic Mega Collection, so we're hoping it doesn't get lost in a sea of new releases, PALGN will have one of the first PAL reviews of the title so keep checking back for more updates.
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