Oozi: Earth Adventure, produced by Awesome Games Studio, released for the PC on January 13. It tells the tale of Oozi, a wide-grinning alien in a 2D platformer with old school side-scrolling antics. The game features a Mario-style campaign with 20 levels and 4 boss fights, and two additional modes, Arcade and Challenge. The game does a great job of showing off some excellent, hand-drawn sprites and models. But, other parts of the game don’t hold up nearly as well.
Let’s start with the good. The story is entertaining at first, even a little funny. Despite the fact I was rolling my eyes, I managed to chuckle every now and then. The game opens with you being told that your character, who, since it’s never specified, must be Oozi, is a “delivery alien”. Everything is going well, until nothing is. Oozi crashes on a planet, which I assume to be Earth, and loses his ship and equipment. For the rest of the game you’ll be hopping around like a rabbit on Red Bull in the search for all his lost goodies.
For that first bit of story, it’s mildly interesting. It isn’t until after the first stage that all the plot points and levels begin to run together. Level design, enemies, and all the palettes are identical, making the game awfully predictable. Every stage has the exact same set-up, with individual levels always the same. Level 1 is collecting stars, 2 is finding a piece of equipment that allows you to do something new yet not entirely new, levels 3-5 have you adjust to different enemies and new moves, and level 6 is just a boss fight. With so few differences between stages, the gameplay feels repetitive and boring.
As a way to acclimate the player to the mechanics of Oozi, the game makes liberal use of hints to the point of absurdity. For the first stage, the game pretends that its levels are well thought-out and features several well-placed hint signs. The charade of smart design falls apart when the exact same enemies have the exact same hints in every successive stage. What was once a helpful guide, turned into a boring, seemingly automatic generation. Related to the faulty hint system, when slightly different enemies start to pop up there is no hint if they’ll hurt when you jump on them, or if you same tactics of “crush it with your feet” still apply. Because of this, hints feel either unhelpful or used so often that they become an inconvenience and an all around annoyance.
The next problem I ran into was the difficulty, which stems mostly from the game’s inability to offer helpful advice or intuitive solutions for problems. The first stage feels exactly how it should; easy to the point of it being silly while still using basic challenges to teach the core gameplay, like figuring out the button combination to pass an obstacle. This was a fine way to start, but it goes down the tube as things progress. Specifically, the difficulty doesn’t really ramp up as the game progresses. The only major difference from level to level is their length, and even that doesn’t change much. Sometimes you can speed through a level without losing health or touching a single enemy, but other times you pound your head, stuck on one section. Since each level chunk and obstacle is an interchangeable block set up in almost the same way as every preceding level, gameplay never really gets more difficult, just different.
To make it even worse, the health system is entirely broken. When playing on easy, your health is replenished at every checkpoint, which is often enough to make health almost meaningless. Play on normal, though, and you gain a heart, up to three, for every 2,000 points you earn. This makes the game significantly more difficult, and this discrepancy between difficulties is deplorable due to the lack of middle ground. On normal, Oozi is so frustrating that it is near impossible to play more than one level at a time, but it’s a sleepwalk on easy. I can’t even imagine how frustrating hard would be; it’s a lose-lose situation.
On the plus side, the audio cues elicit child-like amusement. There is no way to convey how painfully stupid they are, but neither can you keep yourself from giving a short, joyful laugh when a new sound shows up. I don’t know how many times I caught myself bouncing around on bubbles just to hear them pop. Some of the fun does come out of rocketing into the air with next to no way to control Oozi’s movements, almost like the Sonic the Hedgehog games of yesteryear. The fun of this aside, when you lose sight of the ground you’re usually screwed. But, the noise he made when he landed right on a spike forced a smirk to creep across my face every time.
For the final note, we have the biggest ploy of all. I’ve alluded to it before, but stage to stage it’s nothing more than a repaint and re-skin of previous stages, rearranged. Level design doesn’t vary and the changes are slight inconveniences instead of added difficulty. It’s like they thought that adding a moving wall would make the entire sequence that much more complicated, when really it’s more annoying than fun. I’ve got to break it to Awesome Games Studios they did go out of their way to make obstacles too easy around or too complicated.
To put it simply this game is bad.
4.5 out of 10.
