Time to make my final post in the Oddworld section of these forums!
I've played through Soulstorm from start to finish. I played the entire story, did my best to rescue mudokons, still got the bad ending, and downloaded a full clear save file to see the last two levels. I haven't played the DLC, but I've watched playthroughs.
Soulstorm is in many places frustrating, tedious, grating, and overall disappointing. Not just as an Oddworld game, but as an experience in and of itself.
I think what makes it so disappointing is that on paper, so much of what it's trying to do is interesting and has potential, but it's constantly let down by too many game mechanics that aren't meshed well together, abysmal level design that lacks focus and spikes wildly in difficulty, controls that feel too slippery to ever fully master, and a plodding story delivered with grating voice acting. The only thing that shines through for me is the art direction, and even that gets let down in places.
It utterly fails to surpass Abe's Exoddus by any metric, save for graphical power and how many mudokons they can billboard on screen at once. And considering one of these games was made in less than a year while the other was in the works for at least 4, that says a lot.
I do hope that whatever the next Oddworld game is, the developers can learn from the mistakes made here. But it seems pretty clear that the people holding the bag for what went wrong with Soulstorm are the people running Oddworld Inhabitants - Lorne Lanning holds complete creative control over the company and this game, and frankly he has no one else to blame any more.
I'm not mad, I'm just disappointed in what the series has become.
|
