Game Review: Oddworld Stranger's Wrath HD

Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath HD promises nothing more than 2005’s Oddworld: Stranger’s Wrath with more pixels. But pixels are powerful things -- exit the Bounty Store after completing your tutorial, and a sharply detailed western-style high street justifies those extra pixels and forces you to take in the view for a spell. Stranger’s Wrath pulls this trick a few times -- you’ll be platforming in an area of planar structures painted with detailed textures, only to round a corner or crest a hill and look out onto a vista of prairie or jungle that forces the brain to readjust. This is what happens when a developer gives more pixels to a game from 2005 -- an odd mix of new and old.

Razor-sharp corners and an unsettling lack of visual filters (such as film grain, or depth of field) make parts of Oddworld look almost sterile up close -- particularly the parts where you’re platforming or shooting, rather than travelling or collecting rewards from your missions. Dust clouds thicken the atmosphere in some parts of the world and it looks much more natural from a distance, but you’ll spend a lot of Stranger’s Wrath missing those filters that soften the sight of so many modern games.

Fortunately, 2005 wasn’t so long ago in terms of game design. Stranger, an ugly cowboy-shaped thing who evokes a lion with his flat nose and mane-like poncho, starts like he’s a platform mascot but soon reveals himself to be an outback stealth-hero. He double-jumps and climbs ropes to get around, but he traps critters (slugs, spiders, squirrels, etc.) as live ammo before assaulting groups of uglier outlaw-shaped things.

One of the first tricks you’ll learn is to switch to first-person perspective to fire a fuzzle (a ball of fuzz and teeth) and a chippunk (a loudmouthed rodent) near an enemy. When an outlaw comes to shut the annoying chippunk up, the fuzzle leaps and attacks him. Variations of this trick, more tactical and offensive ammo, and rudimentary stealth (i.e. hide in long grass and watch lines of sight) will equip you for most encounters.

Stranger’s just weak enough that most fights are puzzles, rather than typical western shootouts or fist fights. Stranger’s Wrath is, formicly, a first-person shooter and platformer, but it plays like a free-form puzzle game. Of course, some solutions (such as firing your unlimited supply of electric stunners from a great distance, causing enemies to spasm off high drops before you even move into the range of their weapons) feel cheap and unintended, but care and planning will always help you capture those outlaws.

Stranger fights because he needs 20,000 Moolah for a mysterious operation, and can earn this money by capturing or killing wanted criminals. I always resent being told to make x-amount of money in a game, because it turns every task along the way into a job -- capturing or killing outlaws for the first half of the game doesn’t advance Stranger’s story at all, and can feel like work for the few bosses who take forever to shoot down. It’s a shame that the most interesting gameplay, coming from a toybox of weapons and environments that force you to use them creatively, occurs when the plot is at its most boring. When Stranger’s pants are ripped off and his secret revealed, when his story really starts and his “Wrath” justified, a sudden acceleration destroys the considered pace of the early levels.

After outsmarting outlaws who outnumbered and outgunned Stranger, he has the strength and a personal (as opposed to financial) reason to charge right through them like a crazed horse. Earlier levels were undeniably fun, but after being slowed down (and occasionally frustrated) by stronger enemies, the temporary burst of power is cathartic and feels like a reward for all that earlier stealth. Soon enough, stronger enemies slowed me down again, forcing me to use my newly upgraded ammo effectively. But, from that point on, charging head-down through a gauntlet of enemies was freeing and a welcome change of pace.

So Stranger’s Wrath is mixed all around -- environments can look artificial, but the remodelled characters are convincing hybrids of animals and western archetypes; the pace shifts dramatically midway through, almost turning it into a different game; and the PSN download gives a seven-year-old retail game a richly deserved coat of 2011 paint. It’s not without a few age-related hitches (you can only sharpen up an old game so far without completely remaking it), but those who missed the Xbox exclusive can approach Stranger’s Wrath without feeling they’ve gone back in time, confident that it can hold its own with any modern stealth-action game.

Disclosure: Just Add Water provided us with a free copy of the game for review purposes.