Oozi: Earth Adventure

The hallowed moniker of ‘Classic 2-D Videogame Platformer’ is often reserved to games that defined the genre such as Castlevania, Sonic and of course, everyone’s favourite Italian plumber. Many games over the past 25 or so years have attempted to emulate these predecessors in the hopes of basking in their reflected glory. However, we as gamers have an uncanny ability to see past that (potential) plagiarism and look for what really makes them special enough to tell our kids about.

Oozi: Earth Adventure on the PC (which will hereby referred to simply as ‘Oozi’) could be the latest candidate to jump on that already overloaded bandwagon. Will it be remembered as one of the platform greats, or just fade into the background like all the rest? Let’s find out.

Oozi is part of the Steam Greenlight programme; where indie games need crowd-sourced funding to become a fully fledged title or risk never seeing the light of day, so it’s vital at this stage it makes a sold impression on us, the discerning gamer. For reference, the version of Oozi: Earth Adventure is the finished product, it just needs some more moolah to grace our Steam Library.

You play as the title character, Oozi; an alien that has crashed his ship on an unfamiliar planet and your aim is to trudge through the levels finding different parts of your spacesuit, enabling you then to fix your ship and return from whence you came. Sounds simple enough, although there’s nothing in the premise we haven’t seen from other games much older than this.

The gameplay style continues the trend of building on what has come before. Killing enemies is done by simply jumping on them, apart from those with shells or spikes which need to be turned upside down with a stomp to take them out. You have three ‘lives’ which depletes with damage however to regain stars back, simply pick up as many as you can through the level, with every 25 stars collected equalling one star of health.

Finding different parts of your spacesuit grants Oozi a power to use in the next level. From metal arms to smash huge boulders into bits, to gravity-defying moon boots, it’s a nice change that keeps the action varied and opens up the gameplay. Puzzle elements feature sporadically, where you may have to use your new found powers to access new areas. This adds to the game’s longevity and replay factor to keep you coming back for more. There’s a huge variety of enemies on display here, each with their own way of taking away your precious health stars. Capped off with a huge boss fight at the end of every section, the action comes thick and fast.

Speaking of longevity, you should beat the main storyline in about 4 hours. A mere blip on the horizon as far as gaming is concerned these days. To flush it out there’s a ‘speed run’ mode where you have to get through the level within a certain time, as well as a challenge mode which is the same as the main game just with a certain set of challenges you have to complete (such as eliminating all enemies) to achieve the highest score. These extra modes are only unlocked as you complete levels within the main story so you don’t jump into them too early, although I can’t really see why these are locked other than just to make you play through the game fully. It’s a nice idea and a great way to add some meat on these otherwise rather bare bones.

Although somewhat linear in level design, Oozi is presented very well. Colours and textures are vibrant, with cartoon-style imagery enhancing the fun factor as you progress through the different levels. All in all, it’s a very sharp looking game. Varied too, with each level presented in a vastly different way to the last. The music however, seems to be on a loop as there’s not much in the way of variety and what’s there isn’t, how you say, memorable.

Sounds simple on paper, and at first it is…fun too. All too soon however, the difficulty of Oozi spikes massively. Jumps across gaps have to be performed with such precision that can cost you dearly. Everything will try to kill you in a relentless torrent of projectile death, leaving many a life lost and controllers smashed into oblivion out of utter frustration. How can this game be so hard, so fast?!

Gentle strolls through rolling hills jumping on friendly snails and rabbits becomes a frantic dash over hot coals and avoiding a multitude of death-dealing enemies. Your only solace is the checkpoints, and dicing between them becomes an extremely stressful endurance challenge. You’ve not witnessed this kind of difficulty in a 2D platformer since the early Castlevania days. There’s no feeling of achievement when you reach the end of the level, just an exasperated sigh of relief as you remember to blink.

The frequent and (more often than not) cheap deaths tarnish Oozi’s otherwise squeaky clean image. Shame really, as it does have a lot of potential, even though that’s possibly derived from a longing to be one of those fondly remembered platformers of days gone by. It’s certainly captured the frustration of the early 2D games of its ilk, but you can’t help but feel that it’s misplaced in today’s gaming landscape. Back then, dying frequently just made you come back for more in the hope of finally beating that final boss. Oozi cranks up the difficulty of the enemies within a couple of levels in an attempt to break from the norm and offer a fresh challenge. Today, however it’s something we’ve not come to expect from our gaming experience and that difficulty spike may put off some modern gamers for good as they switch back to what they know and love. With games like Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet, Limbo and Braid around these days, is there any room for ANOTHER wannabe 2D platformer? Make up your own mind, if you get the chance to, that is.