This game is really a bad hardcore experience and I can clearly see that it was crafted to resemble an "old" experience in every way. And here is where the bad show up. This game doesn't simply base its experience upon your reflexes. Do not mistake me I'm almost thirthy years old and i had my share with hard games starting from my childhood. Like almost everyone here on GOG. But this game mix the good and the bad things of the old games failing miserably to appeal to new players. Why? Because a lot of times you will do again a level for just one reason. The traps positions, the enemy positions, the terrain position, everything is out here to kill you, a lot of times with instant kill due to the fact that every time you will be hit you will be moved one square back into a pit that cause instadeath. You will have no space to rely on your own way of doing things and jump on this obstacle. You will have to MEMORIZE it. As many of the old platformers of my era too. But are they remebered? Barely. Which old platform everyone play and like? The Metal Slug series. And exactly for one reason, and this was not the incredible number of weapon. Simply because at least it give to you the freedom to jump one centimeter to the right or to the left at your pleasure and fight the bosses in your own style with your fantasy, improving your fun and immersion. Not here. In the very early missions, exactly after the number 2, you will understand that you must repeat and repeat and repeat one stage, more than not you will repeat three stages in a row because you lost all your lives, and that's because some areas were designed to be a pain in your ass, giving you almost no chance to do wrong. Your only option is to exactly remember when and how to do things in the only space that the game give to you, equally to another player without any creativity. The skill in Oniken simply represent a challenge on who has the best musce memory in the fingertips, not who can best think under stress or react quickly. Some enemies are even designed with attacks that can't be avoided in any way so the real challenge with them will simply be to get with more health that you can in front of them and then smash the attack button as fast as you can. Even without any stress because you have already learned, the tenth time that you beat this ass****, that you will succeed or fail by looking at the amount of your health bar. The problem will be after them, when in the next stage to beat the level you will lose your last life due to the unfair terrain and respawning enemies and you will be doomed to do it again. Three stars and only because I'm one player pretty old compared to the standard nowadays, but if you are a young one consider it a two-star game unless you have some masochistic attraction to games that lack creativity and base themselves just on copying old gameplay mechanics, without even trying to improve the clearly bad things of the past era.
I really wanted to like this game. A lot. For some hours, the starting ones, i was even able to do it. Then the reality hitted me with the grace of a mace's hit in the face. This game is buggy in its core mechanics and the bugs are punctual, no matter what you will do. After some hours they will appear and you will be not able to do nothing about them. The janitors mechanics is broken, you can have a small/medium prison of 300 prisoners and 250 janitors will be unable to keep it clean because they will mindlessly run from a side to another of the prison without stopping for the three seconds necessary to clean it. I tested it on every single prison i build. From the first version. And this bug is here even now that we are at the seventh version people, the seventh! Unbelievable. One of your rooms will bug itself inevitably. After some hours into the game, this will happen. Always. Every. Single. Time. The room and the object inside it will become untouchables, nothing on the earth will move that chair, will dump that table o simply erasing the whole room from the AI routines. Wasting all your enjoyment of freedom and liberty your only option will be to accept the reality and to plan your actual and future expasions on this bug, ruining one of the pillars of the game. The freedom in the planning and building phases. Until your next bugged room, after which you will simply restart again and again and again, discovering that the bugs in this game, in the Seventh C Version are punctual. And accurate. They'll never miss a shot. Never. From its first release. If you will play in a prison with special events enabled expect to save after you solved a special situation just to load and find youself again in the same situation, because...... Well I have no valid reasons that came up to my mind after the seventh version of a game. This is a savegame bug, come one. Things like this should happen only in alpha, maybe in beta, but never and i would totally say never in a 1.0 version of a finished product. But oh right..... Have I already told you that we are currently at the 7C version? Maybe yes. I wanted to like it, to some extension i did but every hope is gone and I'm sick and tired of returning to this game just to try that nothing changes. Apart from the version's name. Be warned future customers, maybe it will a wise decision to buy this game after the twentieth version. Before that you are basically rolling a dice, a rigged one.
