An amazing remake with some rather unfortunate issues.
On one paramite we have a very successful attempt at making a very faithful remake of Oddworld: Abe’s Oddysee – a great puzzle/cinematic platformer game from 1997. It’s so good and so close in level layout and design, that it pretty much makes it completely unnecessary to play the original anymore – something that only a truly good remake can do. Everything that was great already was left as is. Everything that required some updating and rebalancing was changed. Quicksave is a huge timesaver and works rather well with a gamepad. Some control changes were an absolute must, so some changes are here straight from Exoddus and some are completely new. Gone is the screen-by-screen level design in a surprisingly smooth transition to the more dynamic camera built levels, which still kept their original layouts almost as is. And the game, at it’s best, looks better than the pre-rendered assets from 1997 (which, if not for the resolution, would’ve still looked good, though).
Sadly, in some things it feels like the devs just went overboard, and in some things it feels like they weren’t experienced enough. So while the game does look better than the original at it’s best, sometimes you notice very muddy texture work, weirdly boring lighting and not very high-poly models that simply don’t look as good as the pre-rendered stuff of the original or just misses the mood of the original a bit. Notably, all the very dark areas that focused on just black shapes/shadows moving in contrast to a more light background, now look much lighter and with more “realistic” lighting, which makes them look less memorable. Also, the game manages to often feel surprisingly badly optimized and demanding more than it looks like it should. Given the lack of noticeable loading screens and rather fast transitions, quicksaves and restarts, some thing can be understood and forgiven, but still.
Especially when some outright weird things get noticed. Like – apparently, this game is one of those rare games that doesn’t have xinput controller support for the range of xinput-compatible hardware, but instead only for the 360 for windows controller. Even xbox one controller can create issues, from weird control behavior, to crashes. Those can be fixed, but are still simply weird to see in 2014-2015. And if the Alf’s escape DLC is any indication of Just Add Water skills of making new gameplay content, then it’s especially sad, because that DLC feels like a dump of all the gameplay elements without anything truly interesting and creative to it – something that the main game is full of. And while we are on topic of gameplay – there is a weird change in number of mudokons you have to save – there’s 200 more of them now. Can’t say that I feel that change justified, except for the sake of saying that 300 feels more like factory crew than 100, maybe?
But anyway, it’s still a fun and fantastic game about running, jumping, farting, giggling “hello-follow-me”-ing and narrow escaping. As a huge fan of Exoddus (which I preferred over the original), I hope to see that one treated same or even better.