Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus

Assembled over a mere period of 9 months, Abe's Exoddus takes the core principles which made its predecessor so special and pushes them even further, expanding upon the straightforward and yet compelling gamespeak, possession, and platforming mechanics to produce a sequel worthy of a place among the best of its genre! The environmental art and FMV cinematics are a triumph in worldbuilding and enrich Oddworld with a sense of scale that makes Abe's journey feel truly epic, meanwhile the addition of a much-needed quicksave option makes the challenge of this title far more accessible to new players.

The movie's actual title is Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus - The Movie. It is based on (or rather taken from) the popular computer and videogame Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus (available for PC and PlayStation). Oddworld Inhabitants, the creators of both the game and this short animated movie, have handed this movie to the Academy which should, judging by the quality of the movie, add it to the 1999 Oscar-nominees of Best Short Animated films. The entire film is rendered by state-of-the-art computer graphics and has a highly original story-line and overall design. At this point, no release in theaters or on video is planned. Let's hope that this will change -- maybe after it will get the Oscar?!

The Playstation and Sega Saturn heralded the switch of almost every game released from 2D to 3D. A number of game types were sacrificed in the process, only the 2D fighter (Street Fighter Alpha), Side Scroller (G-Darius), and platformer (Oddworld) manage to survive one last generation. To my knowledge there has not been a game with 2D gameplay released on any subsequent consoles.

Abe's Oddysee and Exodus use the Playstation's capabilities to provide rich backgrounds and slickly animated characters, all integrated with seamless cutscenes. There have been no games like them before or since (Munch's Oddysee included). Another World, Flashback, Heart of Darkness, Abe's Oddysee and Abe's Exodus represent the last of an era (and not forgotten by gamesplayers of the time).

Oddworld: Abe's Exoddus is almost everything you can hope for in a sequel. It stays true to the original in terms of imaginative story and interesting art design. Also the mechanics are a very organic progression on the original game, allowing you more voice commands to interact with other mudukons. As well as posses pretty much every other creature you come across, then enjoying their interactions with the world and creatures from their perspective. New animals and environments are introduced as well as more cinematics. All in all its a great sequel to a great game.

Having said that, I have some gripes. As mentioned by the developers this game feels a little rushed. The puzzles don't have quite the same mind boggling difficulty of the first game, there isn't a lot of trial and error in order to figure out how to progress. There are good puzzles but it feels like they have gone for quantity over quality in this game.

The voice acting and character dialogue feels much more... goofy. Its still fun and quirky but the original game felt much darker in comparison, even though it was also very silly in places.

Finally, a personal gripe of mine, in the first game Abe's voice commands would trigger certain responses from sligs, now the sligs just respond with "What?" to every command. A bit of a shame, not sure why they took this out. These interactions were a fun little Easter egg in the original.

After completing Oddworld Abes Oddeysee; I started to complete the second game, and this game has two discs, after a very long time it took me to work out the puzzles and door locking systems in Necrum, and rescuing every miner from Soulstrom mining company. The first disc was one long jam-packed adventure, and then Abe returns on the second disc, in Fecco Depot and Soulstorm brew company. After completing all that, I really could not be bothered saving any miners, but the quick save auto save function really helped me through my quest.

This game is one of the best adventure puzzle games ever made, also it has outstanding environments and good 2D graphics. 10 out of 10 ...