Virtual On: Oratorio Tangram

"Fun, but not as good as it was made out to be..."

The only reason I saw this game and bought it was because I had read a lot of the reviews and the game seemed to be pretty good in the eyes of a lot of the reviewers. Sure it's fun, but not as good as everyone made it out to be.

Game Play

The game starts off by being pretty darn hard because it takes quite some time to get used to the controls. The buttons basically all do something different with the exception of two attack buttons and two dash buttons. And you have to figure out when to dash, when to jump, and when to fire quickly if you want to survive your first play.

You start off with 11 Virtuaroids, and are assigned the task of picking one to use. From there your motive is to beat other VR's into scrap metal. It sounds fun, and when you first get in there it's great. But there really isn't that much variety other than different attacks. If you are playing a human or a computer player higher than the first level, the game usually starts out with a dash or a quick attack. It then becomes heated quickly as missiles, lasers, and bombs are shot and flung everywhere.

Beating computer players becomes quite a task though, because as soon as they get behind you, you have to dash like a mad man or jump to find them. Also, there are only three or four moves for each VR and every time you use a move, you have to wait for it to regenerate so you can use it again. Most of the characters regenerate fast enough so you can use each move once or twice in a row and throw in different moves, but these are usually the weaker VR's and the stronger ones require firing weaker weapons two or three times before the stronger ones can be used again.

The computer, having the advantage of always knowing where you are, abuses this power on the harder levels. They can also perform melee attacks much quicker. Since there is no set button for melee attacks, you must get close and hope when you attack it does the melee attack. If you don't do a melee attack you are in for a world of hurt because while you are recovering, the computer player slides around you and smacks you in the back. The melee attacks do major damage too. Once you figure the computer players out though, it's only a matter of time before you become good enough to take them down rather easily.

The multi-player feature is what gets this game a 6 instead of a 5. Playing against a human player is much better because it is a lot more evenly matched and close encounters tend to be funny instead of cheap as you both rapidly mash the attack buttons hoping to get off a melee attack. There are some drawbacks to the multi-player mode though also. You can only do two players. Although single player is always a 1 vs. 1 match, you would have thought they could have made multi-player a four player free-for-all or team battle to satisfy party gamers, but they didn't. You also don't get internet play out of this game either. This feature could have made the game superior to other mech fighters.

I would just like to point out the two other modes besides single player and two player. Training mode and ''watch'' mode. Why you ask? Because these two simple modes that most new fighters have turn out to be the best modes in the game. In training, you can just pick your VR and set the computer player and level select to random, and continually play whether you win or lose, until you feel the need to stop. And if you are tired of playing but like the idea of watching mechs fight, you can set the skill level to something high and watch two computer controlled VR's go at it for minutes, hours, or even days in some cases.

Story

The story is not covered much in-game, but there is a small section in the instruction booklet that comes with the game on the story.

They cover up the lack of story by saying it is shrouded in mystery... The game takes place on earth but in the time of V.C. (Virtual Century) instead of B.C. or A.D. Earth has become one giant corporation. Suddenly, the mysterious finding of the Moon Gate changes things. Enver IV, the most powerful stockholder in a corporation called Dyna-tech, is put in charge of collecting psychic energy coming from the Moon Gate. The energy is drawn from the V-Crystal inside the Moon Gate. This power produced the greatest combat vehicles ever known... Virtuaroids. But for reasons known only to himself, Enver decided to sell the nine power plants collecting the energy to rival companies. Then of course anarchy breaks loose and the Virtuaroid army is split into two rival factions. In this whole thing, contact is lost with the Moon Gate, and power plant #9 mysteriously vanishes with the Tangram. The Tangram is thought to control the Moon Gate and ultimately victory to the first corporation to find it. You are basically a VR ''driver'' for DNA or RNA, the two major corporations who own VR's, and must find the Tangram to win.

Audio/Video

There are no complaints about the sound. The songs are good and vary a lot for all of the levels. The sound effects are good, varying a lot from move to move. If you have heard the attack before, you can tell what someone behind you is attacking with by the sound.

The graphics are great, everything you would expect from a Dreamcast game. The VR's are sleek and very nicely and complexly detailed. The back grounds look good too, but there is not much to the levels. Occasional platforms and objects are in the game, but nothing major. Perhaps if there had been more interaction between the environments and the actual fights, it may have been better. For example, they could have had stuff you could blow up or things you could move. But overall, great in this category.

Replay

You may not want to play single player too much after you have beat it or played it a lot, but training is always fun if you haven't played for a while and so is two player and watch mode. Heh, instead of re-playing you may just want to ... watch!

Overall

Sure, the game is pretty fun, and watch mode can be a great experience in itself, but I wouldn't go out and buy it for 40 or 50 bucks without renting it or playing it with a friend first.

Reviewer's Score: 6/10, Originally Posted: 01/28/01, Updated 01/28/01