Oni

"Great, innovative game"

Basically, Oni is your standard 3rd person action game, only that you'll be kicking and punching your enemies a lot more than you'll be shooting them.

The Story: 7/10
You control Konoko, you're an agent, you fight some terrorist group called ''Syndicate'', and as you progress you realize that you can't trust anyone. Yes, it IS the standard anime orientated storyline, no big surprises, and after every twist you'll find yourself thinking of the movie or game they stole it from.
BUT even though the story is predictable it still isn't bad, but it wasn't my motivation to finish the game.

The Graphics: 8/10
The Graphics are nice, though quiet repetitive. Often theirs several floors with the exact same design, just a few boxes more on the floor. But theirs nothing that hurts your eyes, and nothing that gets in your way when you take out the baddies.
Animations are great, some of the best I've ever seen, especially the different moves (30+).
Also theirs quiet a lot of different enemy types which are all very nicely animated (Yes every enemy type has different moves!).
Great cutscenes also, liked those a lot.

The Sound: 8/10
Quiet good, best are the ''back breaker'' and ''neck snapper'' sounds, quiet satisfying. Gun sounds are ok, since the guns aren't implemented realistically (plasma weapons and such) this doesn't really matter.
Voice acting is ok, mostly, sometimes you're reminded of Resident Evil in terms of quality, but that was quite rare.

The Gameplay: 9/10
Nice mix of punching & shooting, and you can actually decide how much of each you're gonna do, though there ain't a ton weapons and clips and you can only carry one at a time (at least two would have been nice seeing there's two different types of ammo).
You fight quite a lot of enemies which is good, cause besides that you'll spend your time wandering through slightly boring designed levels, pushing buttons and flipping switches (The puzzles aren't bad. There just ISN'T any puzzles, it's the rune type ''find switch, flip switch, go through door'' in a handfull variations.
But the fighting itself is immensely satisfying.

The Controls: 9/10
You control Konoko with mouse and keyboard (if you're smart, I tried gamepad), basically like half life, forward, backward, left and right straffing. You got your two mousebuttons for punching and kicking, respectively, and a third one is best used for reloading. Then two more buttons for dropping weapons & picking up stuff (ammo, weapons, health), one for jumping, one for crouching, and one ''use'' key. Quite easy to remember if you're used to 3d shooters.
Now the fun of combat is the combos. There is simple 3-punch ones or the ''devil spin kick'', best used if you're overwhelmed, there's the ''running lariat'' (You run up to an enemy, grab his neck and vertically ''fly'' around him, kicking other enemies while doing so. Awesome!) and a lot of others.
Also cool is that jumping and punching, jumping forward and punching, jumping backwards/left/right and punching, standing still and punching [...] are all differently animated!
The more complicated combos aren't very easy to do in the thickness of combat, I found myself using the haymaker (3 punch combo) or a 2 punch combo against quick enemies.
You can quite easily set up a combo waiting for the enemy to get up again though.
All in all, controls are easy to get used to (good tutorial) and there is endless possibilities, you can also punch while shooting or slide and shoot (jon woo style).

Overall: 8/10 (close to 9)
I loved this game. Big factor is that I love animes like ghost in the shell. Also it's nice to not only shoot, there's just too many average shooters, Oni is a great innovation.
With combos and weapons there will be a lot of incredibly cool situations like you shooting one enemy with your smg, then breaking the 2nd enemies neck while the 3rd one snipes you with the crossbow and the 4th one tries to reach his weapon from the ground.
What I missed is a good level design, an innovative story and blood. The flashing system is important for the game (the flashes indicate the health of the enemies), but there could have been at least SOME gore.
Also, the replay value is not really high, the game is straightforward, the same everytime you play it.
But the only real drawback for me was the saving system, you can't save by yourself, the game does this automatically at certain points. If you reach such a savepoint low on health you might have to backtrack to the last save...

A few hints before you start your game:

- Play on easy! Believe me it's hard enuff...
- Never underestimate your enemies! Quite often I was punching a weak one, almost killed him, already relaxing, then he rolls to the side, picks up an smg and blasts me away.
- Keep trying! The game gets quite hard later on, I actually replayed one scene about 20 times before I finally got it.
- You don't have to solve annoying traps if you got a lot of stimpacks...
- Stealth is in some areas way easier.

***Buy this game if you like animes, download the demo first if you're not***

Reviewer's Score: 8/10, Originally Posted: 07/20/01, Updated 07/20/01