4 out of 4 people found this review helpful.
Omikron didn't see us coming... but it saw us leaving.
Date of Review: Sep 8, 2001
The Bottom Line: If you've got a massive patience level and don't mind the outlay of about $20 on this game, try it. Otherwise, avoid it.
This game had the potential to be a good game. Really, it did -- even though it was a port, it had several good things going for it. The story (cyberpunk) is something rarely seen anymore, and honestly not really seen at all on Dreamcast. The music came from actual famous people like David Bowie. It had the Eidos name, and they had a few great releases on the Dreamcast (Soul Reaver: Legacy of Kain, anyone?).
But all that flies out the window from the time you boot it up to play. The game starts out with an overly-cheesy intro about how you have to transfer your soul to the main character's body and save the world -- the sound effects in the intro are subpar at best, the graphics are so out of sync with the voices that I don't know why they bothered with lip syncing, and then you finally get transported into the actual game world.
Again, Omikron really "struts its stuff" -- choppy framerates when about the only thing on the screen is a spinning fan, and then you get launched into another non-interactive scene. Eventually you get out into the world, only to launch into an intro movie which lasts several minutes (and keep in mind you can't skip any of the cut scenes or movies). David Bowie sings "Omikron didn't see us coming," which is likely because we were never coming after we ran screaming from it.
Framerates are choppy throughout, which seems to stem from the game's loading slowly as you explore rather than pre-loading. Even after an area has loaded, it continues to run choppily -- you can be surrounded by only buildings, and still get maybe 25 fps. Get a few people or vehicles on the screen, and it goes downhill. Compare this to Shenmue, where you can have countless people on the screen and still remain playable.
More frightening than the framerate is the level of detail in the game. Rather than looking like many of the high-quality Dreamcast games with kick-butt graphics, we instead get a game that would be barely passable as pretty on a first-generation Playstation.
The story's good. The music's good. The idea in and of itself was decent, but there's just a lot of bad stuff. It came, it tried, but then it failed.
Someone want to take this and redevelop it so it doesn't suck so much?
