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Ever since the wide-eyed weekend we all first drank in The Matrix, there’s officially been nothing cooler than a sleek, latex-clad martial arts display. When we first got a glimpse of Oni, a game that promised a multiplayer chop-sockin’ romp through a techno future, we immediately flagged it as one of our most eagerly-anticipated games in development.
So now that it’s here, I can’t help but be a bit disappointed. Oni is a fun game with just enough style and action to keep it on its feet. But after three years in development, the game’s promising multiplayer component was abandoned and it’s nothing like the whirlwind of goodness we were hoping for.
Oni winds up as a fast-paced third-person combination of kung fu, gunplay, and anime. You play as Konoko, a brainy battlin’ babe molded from the same cast as the heroine of Ghost In The Shell. Konoko’s father was a brilliant scientist and political activist who was tragically forced to euthanize his wife as part of questionable experiments. It should come as no surprise that Konoko decides justice has gotta get served.
The bulk of the game is spent steering Konoko through the glossy confines of futuristic facilities and urbanscapes, running, jumping, tumbling, rolling, and crawling through the future-noir environs. Oh, and stompin’ a lot of ass as well, courtesy of an elaborate hand-to-hand fighting system.
The real fun lies in beating the tarnation out of an endless series of thugs, ninjas, and terrorists. Once you’ve adapted to the keyboard setup there’s a good variety of martial arts combos and throws to perfect, and there’s nothing more satisfying than cracking some punk in two with a well-timed backbreaker.
But in addition to dropping perps on their heads, Konoko can use a variety of guns. Shooting at long range is handled pretty well in the third-person gameplay, using laser sights for most targeting (be quick to grab guns, though, since some weapons will simply disappear if you let them sit on the ground for too long.) Konoko can only carry one gun at a time, which seems annoying at first, but it rightly forces you to rely on fists more than your trigger finger.
Beyond the beatings, though, there isn’t too much to get excited about. Developed simultaneously for the PC, Mac, and the PlayStation 2, Oni makes too many concessions to the console. In an astonishing oversight, there is no way to reconfigure the controls through the menu -- although it is possible to edit a text file in the Oni directory. Nor is there a way to adjust the mouse sensitivity, or, strangely, to play with a gamepad.
But the most egregious mistake is the lack of in-game saves. Recent PC games like Ground Control, Giants, and Hitman have all ignored in-game saves to their detriment, and Oni pulls the same bone-headed design limitation.
The problem is inflamed by tedious jumping puzzles, which force you to leap over lasers or suffer instant death. Many levels have to be played over and over again until a combination of luck and skill gets you to the next in-mission set save point.
But making it to that next save won’t guarantee a fresh experience around the next corner: Oni is disappointingly redundant. Throughout the 15 levels, you only do two things: search for consoles that will unlock doors, and beat up the thugs who get in the way. Only one level, which takes place entirely in Konoko’s mind, shows any real imagination, and it’s over too quickly. If you’ve played the demo, you’ve pretty much experienced Oni’s entire spectrum of gameplay.
There’s also a general lack of inspiration in level design and graphics. Bungie’s designers were apparently influenced by the radical designs of shoeboxes, straws, and icecube trays, as Oni consists almost entirely of big boxes connected to little boxes by tubes. Warehouses, hangars, offices, and labs all offer silent testimony to the grandeur of the rectangle.
Further adding to the sameness of it all is the repeated tiling of certain textures. Because so much of the game takes place in pretty bland environments like offices and labs, it’s not surprising to find the same blue/gray surfaces everywhere. But too much of the world is utterly empty, with no feeling of being inhabited by people. There are no restrooms, cafeterias, or lounges to suggest that Konoko’s world is populated by anyone other than her and a few thugs; it’s a sad ballad of Oni the Lonely.
To be fair, however, there is a certain minimalist charm at work. Konoko is nicely modeled and wonderfully animated, as are most of the villains. When you punch an enemy, the colorful explosions not only tell you how much energy they have left, but add some much needed pyrotechnics While most anime overwhelms the viewer with the sheer amount of visual detail, Oni goes in the opposite direction, and at times the starkness can be pretty cool.
An excellent techno soundtrack helps get you into the story. When the action picks up, so does the music, with an appropriately futuristic beat that throbs and pulses with a great bass line. All the voice acting is first-rate, although during the in-game cinematics the models just bob their heads without moving their mouths.
Oni benefits from the fact that it doesn’t have a whole lot of competition on the PC. Sure, Lara has a ton more moves, but not even Heavy Metal’s Julie can kick butt like Konoko. It’s the basic thrill of delivering a spinning roundhouse to some sucker’s jaw that ultimately saves Oni, and also makes the lack of multiplayer all the more disappointing. And because the levels all walk the straight and narrow, there’s little reason to replay the game once you’ve beaten it.
Oni could’ve been one for the ages, and it’s disappointing to see a talented developer like Bungie take so long to turn out such an ordinary product. Lack of in-game saves is annoying enough, but combining it with tiresome jumping puzzles is a very bad idea that should be consigned to the graveyard of vanilla boot disks and side-scrolling games.
Final analysis: tons of cool kung-foolery, and $40 well-spent if that’s enough to satisfy you. But you’ll definitely feel a twinge of sadness for the game that this could have been.