Posted on: December 30, 2016
anslem
Games: 25 Reviews: 3
Beautiful, but critically flawed
At first glance, Ori seems like it's going to be something truly special. It looks great, it feels great and it has a wonderful atmosphere and tone to it. Less than an hour in however is when the cracks start to show and boy oh boy, these are some cracks. The first is it's completely broken save system. A system that requires energy to use (?!), it's also a save anywhere system. This means you can very easily get yourself into impossible and unwinnable situations relatively early in the game where you will literally be unable to progress further. The developers turned the act of saving into this bizarre meta-game for absolutely no reason. No matter how good or bad a game is, the save system is THE. ONE. SINGLE. PART. YOU. CAN. NOT. !@#$. UP! Sadly, they did indeed, and it bleeds over into every other part of the game like a terrible fart cloud covering up even the good aspects in it's stink. Second, there's a lot of cheap deaths here. Difficulty spikes are one thing (of which this game has plenty of btw) but the sheer number of instant and at times unavoidable deaths (in a game with a health system!) is borderline obscene. Combine the cheap deaths with the broken save system and you have a recipe for disaster right from the get go. I could continue pointing out issues but with just these two systems alone there's little point beating a dead horse. Ori is fundamentally flawed on it's most basic level and as a result the entire game is dragged down into the muck because of it. This game is classic example of a studio that has the resources, has the money and even has the ideas, but doesn't have the experience or the sense to put a game together properly.
Is this helpful to you?
