Oddworld: Strangers Wrath (Xbox)
This is my daytime game at the moment – playable when the kids are up and about without giving them the screaming habdabs. It seems to be that the blokes who do the oddworld series can do no wrong – consistently turning out beautiful, original, and fiendishly tough games, and Strangers Wrath is no exception.
Essentially, you play a weird mumbling bounty hunter and have to go around capturing various bad guys by firing various types of “live” ammo from your wrist mounted crossbow. The ammo various from wee bugs which wrap the baddies up in webs, to flappy thuddy things that knock em out. One particular highlight is the little squirrel like annoying things which are so intensely irritating that they can be used as lures as the baddies are unable to resist running across and stomping on them. One particularly nice touch is the way these little chaps blether and chat away to you as they’re loaded into the crossbow.
The game is played both from First Person (for the shooty bits) and third person (for the scampering about like a loony platformy bits). It works surprisingly well. I’m just a short way in at the moment, but enjoying every second. There seems to be a huge amount to do, as well, and given that it’s taken me ages to catch the first couple of bad guys – hunting for ammo in the wilderness, getting to the bad guy’s lair, and then working out how best to use my limited ammo to overcome the massively numerically superior enemies kinda indicates that this one could take quite some time.
So – summation of my experience to date: It’s beautiful, it’s funny, it’s poignant (no, really!), and it has a fantastic game mechanic. I think this one will happily remain my daytime game once I’ve finished RE4 and started it again from the start 🙂
Poor hitm4n – you posted a comment asking if I’d sell – the short answer is NO WAY ON GOD’S EARTH – RE4 is easily the game of the year and worth 30 of anyones notes 😉
