Oddworld Stranger's Wrath (Xbox)

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Customer reviews

review by: Jax date: 2008-03-08 rating:
Good fun for children (and big children!!!)
As with the oddworld games, this game is very well executed in artwork and gameplay. I have thoroughly enjoyed playing it and got quite addicted to the point where 7 hours of a Saturday was spent in continuous gaming!

I would highly recommend it to anyone wanting a fun game which requires some strategy and quick thinking - the characters are great and the stranger himself, a take on Clint Eastwood, is fantastic.

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review by: date: 2008-01-20 rating:
Review plus a note on final bosses
A first person shooter with a tongue-in-cheek Western setting, Stranger's Wrath is one of the nicest looking and most playable xbox games I've experienced by far, and deserves to have done much better than it did. The exploration and shooting of Metroid combined with the stealth, cunning and cartoon violence of Sly Cooper. For ammo variety and weirdness, comparable to Ratchet and Clank.

The good:
Stranger's controls are very user-friendly, the environments are beautiful, varied and interesting, the bosses are for the most part very cleverly set up, and an intellectual as well as button-mashing challenge. The story is marvellous, as is usual for OWI. The cut-scenes are very good, and the in-game movies are breath-taking even now the xbox console has been surpassed graphically. An interesting twist to the game gives Stranger even better new moves, and the final third of the game is frankly incredible. The enemy grunts are cute and amusing, the villagers' comments are hillarious, and the live ammo is not just a gimmick, but highly effective and ingenious. As always with OWI, there is a moral message to the game, which is part of what makes their games so refreshing and different, but the game is more thought-provoking than didactic. The controls are surprisingly intuitive, and Stranger will prevent you getting lost or too muddled in the massive, complex landscapes of the game by reminding you in his sullen drawl what your current mission is. The violence is, for the most part, not severe - in true Oddworld tradition, you can leap (or push a hapless enemy) into a meat grinder, which isn't pretty, but that's your own fault. Just remember you can save absolutely anywhere, and enemies earn you far more money if captured alive.;)

The Bad:
A few glitches, nothing major. Once you've done a level, you can't go back, mostly. The game is very stingy with some ammo while providing a surplass of other kinds, which can get irritating. I would have preferred a more electronica sound-track like Ratchet and CLank games as the sound-track for the most part is rather downbeat compared to the frantic action in the game. The chicken and newt people aren't as nice-looking as the mudokons or Munch in the other games, and the Outlaws, while they have a lot of charm, aren't nearly as cool as the Sligs. Fanboys/girls of the other three games might be disappointed that Stranger uses a crossbow and muscle power more than sneaking and trickery to win his battles, and that of course the major characters from the Abe/Munch games aren't in this. Some of the bosses and indeed levels come across as uncreative/repetitive in that winning comes down to quicksave and button-mashing more than player cunning and skill. As with Munch's Oddysee, I found the occasional problem with the camera, and jumping, but Stranger is still the most easily playable 3d character I've experienced after Ratchet and Sly Cooper. The tutorial level is frankly tedious, and some of the earlier levels are a bit dull and samey, but stick this out and you'll be well rewarded!

Final bosses (spoiler alert!):
Some people seem to have problems with these, and some of the internet walkthroughs give bad advice - actually these are easier to kill than a lot of the outlaws, here's my tips:

2 Octigi: Don't worry if these come too close and stab you up - if you keep shooting them with riot slugs and boombats (or stingbees) they will turn green and teleport away, so you can heal yourself before starting another battle. It can be hard, but if you keep pressing R1 you will get shooter control so can damage them if you hurry.

Sekto: First of all, you DO NOT need boombats for this, as a lot of internet advice implies by telling you you need a full clip of everything. Just blast his generators (the round things shooting power to his ball-shield) from behind the wall-chunk with riot-slugs and stingbees, then run/charge away before he knocks it down, and keep moving until a new chunk falls, then repeat. If you keep on the move, and don't blast/heal standing still for too long, with luck he won't shoot the lethal pink lazer at you more than once or twice during the battle. If he keeps shooting the pink lazer at you, you are shooting the generators for too long - reduce the time you spend shooting and start to flee before he turns on the pink and makes the protective wall-chunk start to crumble. There are plenty of stingbees behind you, so don't worry about running out. Good luck!

Conclusion: buy this while it's still available, but only if you have a working xbox - it doesn't look like it'll be converted for the 360 although Munch was; what a shame! If you have a copy you don't use, please sell it so others can enjoy! Shame they didn't make Fangus, I hope Citizen Seige comes out soon and does well, and they bring back Oddworld in the future.:)

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review by: date: 2006-11-21 rating:
a work of genius........
this game is a work of genius from the Oddworld guys who make a game what it should be...

fantastic artwork and characters with a storyline to boot!!

brilliant.

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review by: date: 2006-07-24 rating:
Finally it's over! A 5 star start but collapses into nothing very quick.
Well, I finally finished it.
It starts well, the graphics and animation are great, it works far better than Halo2 or any other Xbox game. It's graphics have been cleverly thought out to get the best from the xbox without overdoing the effects. Halo2 and Butcher Bay have bump-mapped everything to death, Wrath avoids this, masking it's deficits cleverly.

Initially the new ideas for a FPS/3rd Person stealth game seem very clever...But the level design and what you end up doing with these new ideas are highly unimaginative and in general dull and frustrating. The difficulty curve is all over the place, one moment it's easy, the next time it takes ten times and hours to complete.

Boss battles are button mashing mayhem, not clever puzzles as hoped. Bosses will actually have path finding accidents like spearing themselves on spikes, whilst you are on the opposite side of a level. As half way through the game, the bounty hunting becomes redundant, motivation steeply falls away, as we loose the western style. But as bounty boss fights were mostly annoying battles of attrition, I was beyond caring much. Unlike Zelda Wind Waker, this game has little intelligent to say on boss fights, as with the constant "push button X2" puzzles. Towards the end it even mimics Wind Wakers time filling boat sections.

The problem in a nutshell, is this game promises so much, then repeats it's meagre sack of (good) ideas over and over in limited levels. A vastly more compact game would help, it's not big in level terms anyway, but tactically dealing with enemies with an easily depleted life bar can go on forever (shoot, run away, shoot, run away, remember that and you'll be fine most times).

This is a missed opportunity, some nice ideas, good graphics (well, art direction is great up to half way, then it's grey industrial most of the time). To be honest I hated the game for so much of the time, I just wanted to get to the end; I cheated to finish it. It had become such a chore, I wanted it over as quickly as possible. Not that that made it possible to finish all the time, as bugs meant doors closed and would never reopen, however much you pressed X. Yes, even if you cheat, save often as you may need to restart due to flaws in the game. As I recommend you cheat for the last level of the game. It has almost everything I hate (aside from an escort mission); it has a time trial section, then using old bosses but two instead of one, then reusing a similar shielded boss routine, then a short so-so ending. Halo has a time trial right at the end (it even had an escort mission and yes... I shot him by accident).
So:

GOOD:

Graphics,
Animation,
Art Direction.(first half).
Ammo ideas.
Demented western theme.

BAD:

Chicken characters, (not as hateful as that big cluck Mel Gibson in bland Chicken Run).
Plot twists (X2) The first is obvious, then leads to pointless 2nd half. The twist at the end... go on...guess.
The plot, little to it, no great character background information (but did you get to know much about Clint Eastwoods character in his western movies). It's no RPG at least.
Repetition, repetition, repetition. Ammo being reduced to the two ammo style to take own most enemies including bosses.
Fights being button mashing attrition, when it should have been cunning and clever tactics. it feels like the game doesn't know what it should be, FPS? Stealth? Platform?
Level design is crap, yes I know the graphics are pretty, but did you have to repeat so many ideas? Like most games, there's too much filler and even in this linear game, you can easily find yourself going in a wrong direction on occasional confusing levels.

Good concept, shame about the finished product.

oh, the cheat?
Whilst playing:
1. Insert a second controller into port 2 on your xbox.
2. Remove the second controller.
3. On controller 1 press X, X, Y, Y, B, B, A, A to activate cheat mode.
You will hear a sound confirming that the 'cheat mode' has been activated.

X, Y, A, B, X, Y Invincibility

You may have to try these cheats several times to get it to work, in the end I'm not sure if you need the firat cheat to get the second to work. Mash away.


review by: slimlestraw date: 2006-03-17 rating:
Great game - especially for the price!
Bought this a couple of weeks ago having spotted it here for just under £7. Almost completed it now and it's been great fun. Superb graphics, interesting story (nice plot twist) and friendly controls.

I'd highly recommend this at the usual price, but for this price you'll kick yourself if you don't buy it!

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