Oni First Look

I played through the Oni demo, and thought I'd write down my first impressions based on the several featured demo levels.

First of all, let me just say that I've waited for a long time to finally play a decent martial arts, beat-em-up game on the PC. I caught myself a few times wanting to give that 'Dead or Alive' thing a go on the Dreamcast, and I even did once, and found it extremely addictive. It's really nice to kick somebody's ass in a game, and I just couldn't understand why the developers (apart from Mucky Foot maybe) decided to skip this genre on the PC. Well, there's one new game slated for release, and it's called Oni, which stands for "ghost," or "daemon" in Japanese.

Oni's story takes place three decades in the future, not a very happy future, that is... The heroine - Konoko, is a member of the Tech Crimes Task Force (TCTF), an organization fighting organized crime. Once the action starts, you find yourself in a frantic whirlpool combining all the action of a shooter with the action of a hand-to-hand fighting game, in one seamless interface; or as Bungie team would put it: "Full-Contact action."

The game is heavy into that Japanese anime style look and is actually slated to appear both on the PS2 and PC. A bit of Japanese console market milking for Bungie and Take 2? As some of you already know, Oni's been under development by the Take 2 wing of the Bungie team (as opposed to the HALO, Microsoft wing). No matter which division of the company is doing the coding, you know you can expect a quality title when Bungie signs the project. I must say, ever since the first Myth game, Bungie is yet to disappoint me with a crappy game. Of course, since Oni is a martial arts anime style title, it's only natural to expect a lot of things to be modified for consoles. Luckily, Oni's still a "fairly PC project," meaning players will be able to use mouse look while moving. However, there's no save game option. Surprise, surprise! The game will automatically save when you go through a segment of a level. As far as any other console-related drawbacks, I paid closer attention to the textures, and I must say they appear a bit plain (even in 1024 and 32-bits). So, what does that mean? It simply means that it's a multi-platform, and not a PC-only title; at least as far as the textures go. On the other hand, the frame rate was rock solid throughout the demo, and it didn't fall under 40FPS on my PIII GeForce, 128Mb RAM office rig.

The fight animations and character movement are excellent. Something you'd definitely expect from a martial arts game looking to do well on the PS2 market. Konoko, the main character just has a whole barrage of moves at her disposal. The fighting scenes look very nice; certainly the best beat-em-up action I've seen on the PC. The girl will do summersaults, she'll jump, punch, and kick like Bruce Lee when he gets a taste of his own blood, and it's all very fluent, and natural. The kicks and punches are accompanied by nice sound effects, which all makes for a very entertaining martial arts action. Konoko even learns new moves as the game progresses. Hell, you'll learn a new move in the demo! Without a doubt, hand-to-hand combat plays an integral part in Oni, so it's very important to create an intuitive interface for the users. There's no need for the players to go 'loco' from all the keys they need to memorize in order to become semi-proficient in martial arts.