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Omikron: The Nomad Soul

Few games are as hypeworthy as the wildly ambitious "Omikron: The Nomad Soul". It's a true 3D world; it's got music by David Bowie; your soul can travel from body to body; it's got elements of adventure, shooter, fighting and RPG games. It's a game that wants you to say, "whoa, cool." And you certainly will.

But I don't know if I'm ever going to finish playing it.

It starts out great. A guy asks your help to save his world, and you enter his body and whoosh, you're in a strange and distant city. The buildings are massive and alien, the advertising is glaringly neon, the women dress like hookers and the guys all look like soccer thugs. You call a hovercar taxi and go to your host's apartment, where you have sex with your girlfriend (I don't know how you manage to have sex fully clothed, but you do) and feed your lizard, although perhaps that's redundant.

You are in an oppressive world, a cop keeping an eye out for terrorist activity. You were investigating a murder case, but now there's a cover-up and it looks like you're being set up. Your investigations take you to the seedy part of town, where you can check out the modestly dressed strippers and find a free pass to a David Bowie concert. It's all got that cool, urban Bladerunner feel to it.

There was a movie out a few years back called From Dusk Till Dawn. In a tense, edgy beginning a couple of robbers screw up and find themselves on the run with a kidnapped family. It's fast-paced and gritty, and then suddenly, out of nowhere it turns into a cheesy horror film. It made me go "Wha? Huh?" All the movie's early promise wiped out in a second.

That's pretty much what happens with Omikron. The gritty, urban mystery is suddenly replaced by a lot of silly demonology that suggests the game designers are real Dungeons and Dragons geeks. To be fair, I am not a big sci-fi/fantasy fan. Stuff like Dune just annoys me. On the other hand, I like urban monster stuff like Kolchak or The X-Files. Omikron is just way too hokey for me.

But I kept playing, because it was still pretty cool.

As I mentioned, Omikron mixes in a bit of a number of game types. As a shooter it's not too bad, although it's unusually difficult to aim. As a fighting game it seems okay, but then, I don't play fighting games (I found that a certain key sequence would give me a vicious jump-kick that allowed me to win all the fights pretty easily). Like an RPG, your experience determines how successful you are in action sequences and you can make money and use it to upgrade equipment. And throughout are fairly simple puzzles.

The first real aggravation was when I got to Jaunpur, one of the several distinct sectors that make up the city. Up until then getting around had been pretty easy, but Jaunpur is one of these twisty-windy street-type cities where it's pretty difficult to find your way around. Those hovercars will only deliver you to a point kind of close to where you want to be and you're on your own from there. This proved quite aggravating.

Totally lost I turned to a walkthrough and found my way to an action sequence. And this is a good point to bring up saving your game.

In the beginning, you are told, "There's no saving and going back if you get into trouble. You are entering a real world. If you make mistakes, you'll just have to accept the consequences." I wish this were true. Imagine a game in which you must follow a narrative line from start to finish. The game could automatically save when you exit. As long as there's a way to keep you alive to the finish -- and Omikron is set up in that way, as when your host body dies you can jump to a new one -- you could play the game straight through and feel like it was a real world situation. But Omikron instead simply limits your ability to save; you can only save at certain locations in the game if you have a magic ring available. You can't save at all in an action sequence.

Climbing up and down the sides of buildings, jumping across roofs, being shot at and being attacked by mechanical watchdogs and having no idea where I was going I died time after time. And then I gave up.

A couple of months later when I was low on games I thought I'd try again. First I find an Omikron "trainer." A trainer is a program that allows you to cheat. With my trainer I could increase my number of magic rings and increase how much money I had. I gave myself an incredible amount of money and bought really, really expensive weapons. Then I used a walkthrough to figure out where I was supposed to go and I blasted my way through the action sequence.

It's hard playing a game you've lost faith in. Omikron seemed silly and aggravating. I found myself cheating on puzzles that probably aren't that difficult just because I wasn't taking the game seriously. So I decided to stop again. And I decided to write my review, because who knows if I'm going to ever finish the damn thing.

If you want to play the kitchen sink then this action/adventure/fighting/rpg sci-fi/fantasy game might just be for you. But for me, Omikron suggest those saddest of words, "It might have been."

-- Charles Herold -2000

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