Chances are you’ve heard about the popular game Oddworld Soulstorm but want to know if it’s worth playing before getting started, which is why you’re here. If you are new to the Oddworld universe, you’ll be shocked to discover that Oddworld: Soulstorm is essentially one massive escort search. We’ve got some game news for you. Let’s dig in.
Let’s expand on that. Not only is it one extensive escort search, but all of the followers you’re escorting aren’t the sharpest tool in the shed (and that’s saying it lightly!), get gruesomely slaughtered by whatever gets blown at them, and whine almost endlessly.
This unique game aims to hold these worthless followers alive through trial and error while they progress across extremely dangerous and challenging levels. It’s all on you! Most video game news won’t point out the negatives, but we’re going to give it to you just the way it is – no sugarcoating!
The best of the Oddworld series lies in the time right after you or your followers have encountered an end to their lives that could have easily been avoided. Your corpse-like followers carelessly run into deadly barriers, take way too much time walking across an area where careful timing is needed to avoid getting killed, and do almost nothing to protect themselves if invaded.
You are the shepherd of the world’s stupidest flock of goats. Regardless of how frustrating it may be, you just can’t resist the amusement!
Oddworld Soulstorm is a remake of Oddworld: Abe’s Exoddus from 1998 that revisits the extremely strange Oddworld universe. However, the remake is just as devilishly complex as PS1 games were: every level seeks a different way to jeopardize you and your followers’ lives in a shrewd examination of your cunningness, imagination, and endurance.
While an area could enable you to slip past armed soldiers you’d have little chance of defeating in open battle, while another may require you to hold dozens of enemies occupied long enough for dozens of your followers to flee.
The checkpoint system, which saves your advancement after almost any obstacle, is Soulstorm’s sole good factor for players. Reducing the number of demanding tasks you’ll have to replay helps you avoid transforming the laugh you’re going to get out of it into extra frustration whenever you get injured by an armed guard or lose hundreds of followers by falling for a trap.
Failure with little danger helps you vanquish every level and formulate the ideal solution for solving the next stumbling block while keeping yourself and your followers safe. The disadvantage is that checkpointing does not enable you to save manually at any point in the game, which leads to several tedious parts where you must re-do everything for each death. That takes up a lot of game time and eventually becomes tedious. We’re getting tedious just about this this part of our game news article!
However, Abe’s amazing signature power to possess antagonists and use them as your weapon against the enemy is the most important weapon you have in your hands. You can force possessed opponents to destroy their mates, assist you in solving a mystery, or simply blow them up to get them out of the way. That’s a fantastic way to offer yourself an advantage over the massive odds piled against you.
The enemy puts anti-chant devices everywhere, giving you a zap whenever you want to possess something, but Soulstorm is a little stingy about how much you can really utilize your shamanistic abilities. Though, on the other hand, it wouldn’t be much of a problem if they didn’t.
The trickiest parts are when you have to depend on your followers to help you battle, which results in a tragedy in most situations. Though ordered to stand in one place and manually armed with suitable guns for the task, the inept allies are painfully unreliable.
Your mudokon friends are always slow to respond and utterly clueless, allowing themselves to be slaughtered without defending themselves or just standing there with a blank face as they witness the enemy slay a bunch of their comrades.
Although the legitimate obstacle is an enjoyable uphill battle, Oddworld Soulstorm often has certain unintended difficulties – glitches, and yes, you’re going to encounter quite a few of them. Many players complain about minor visual bugs and, ultimately, game-breaking problems such as followers vanishing entirely from the field. Going back to the main menu and restarting the level or closing and launching Oddworld Soulstorm solved the problem in the majority of situations. Still, glitches are so frequent that they’re sure to add to your frustration in a game that thrives on challenging you to the limits.
Oddworld Soulstorm Inhabitants, the game’s developer, has been notified about these glitches and has even released some updates to correct some of them. Still, with too many to fix, it’s evident that Soulstorm could have used a little more improvement (similar to the majority of the games developed during the COVID-19 era).
You might just rush through each stage selfishly without saving anybody, but that would eventually bring your journey to a premature end with a disappointing conclusion. There are four different endings in total: the best, the good, the bad, and the worst. The best and worst endings are essentially minor variants of the good and bad endings, with the latter only visible to the most devoted players and the former honoring those who are spectacularly terrible at holding their followers alive.
However, there are significant variations in the bad and good endings. By finishing each level and finding every single corner in order to save all of your imprisoned brothers, you’ll be compensated with two extra levels at the end of the game, as well as a satisfying ending. It’s a great motivator to protect as many of your followers as possible, and it encourages players to strive for perfection at each level.
As soon as you complete Oddworld Soulstorm, you’ll be able to play the levels again, which is handy if you didn’t get the happy ending the first time through. The catch is that on a replay, you could complete a whole level at once. This seems to be a deliberate decision, and it would be fine if it worked well every time, but with so many game glitches – a majority of which can be solved by exiting the game or returning to the menu – an error can trigger you to miss more than an hour of your progress.
Oddworld Soulstorm’s storyline is an aspect that makes it absolutely worth the pain that its challenging levels and various bugs bring to the table. The power-hungry glukkons are grotesque, opportunistic creatures, and the setting’s bleak portrayal of unconstrained capitalism and environmental degradation is unique, amazingly distinct, and wittily macabre. Every feature of Soulstorm is so beautiful and otherworldly that anyone can easily get swept up in Abe’s path from an incompetent slave to unexpected revolutionist.
The developers have improved the controls from previous entries, making them more flexible. Although the maneuverability in Oddworld Soulstorm may also be improved, it is still the finest the series has seen to date. Certain things might be better, such as the miss-or-hit quality of the ability to climb up ledges or swing between poles during platforming parts, but it’s always a world apart from Oddworld Soulstorm: New N’ Tasty’s clunkiness. The double jump’s responsiveness, in particular, helps you to tackle obstacles more accurately and outlast the plethora of deadly traps that are almost everywhere, just waiting for you to get caught.
The crafting system and weapons inventory are well-designed, and it encourages players to discover each corner in pursuit of valuable equipment. For instance, you can make rubber stick balls that can capture almost all enemies instantly, but the resource cost is substantial. You may also create sticky explosive bombs to unlock doors to new sections and shoot enemies or a flamethrower to make life much more straightforward in each level.
The drawback is that you must start with absolutely no resources at the start of each game, which may be annoying when you only spent the previous hour building up a complete arsenal, but it’s expected because it limits the resources you have in each level to add interesting challenges. For example, you can have only the tools required to make smoke bombs at the start of a level, requiring you to rely solely on stealth to clear the area. When you have more equipment and can make various tools, you can have many more choices on tackling the following sections.
While most aspects of the game are vastly improved over Abe’s Exoddus, the Oddworld Soulstorm sound design might also use some improvement. To be honest, Soulstorm is an auditory nightmare, apart from the superb voice acting.
For example, the sound settings are all over the place – voices are often much too silent, and sound effects can often be too noisy. I’d switch up the volume because I couldn’t understand what was happening, just for it to suddenly get unbearably loud a couple of minutes later, leaving me desperately reaching for the remote control. Changing the audio thresholds in the settings doesn’t help much, and there’s no continuity in how noisy all of the audio is.
Video Game News: Final Thoughts On Oddworld Soulstorm
Oddworld Soulstorm is a spectacular modernized remake of a classic side-scroller that we recall fondly but no longer holds up. It’s a unique, delightfully bizarre, yet utterly satisfying journey with a beautiful tale and a lot of heart, even though it can be an annoying grind to complete levels that are quest-heavy. Besides, it has too many glitches that need restarts to fix, transforming a nice challenge into an inferior kind of annoyance. We hope this game news article has helped you make a decision towards your gameplay!