Reviews// Oddworld: Stranger's Wrath (Xbox)

OSW's biggest strength is probably the way it fills an obvious void on the Xbox roster. It's partly built as a platform adventure game and so manages to compete effectively with established PS2 favourites such as the Ratchet and Clank series, something that the likes of Blinx failed to do. But it's also built partly on rock solid FPS foundations, and so offers substantial appeal to more trigger-happy tastes. The exploration and platforming bits are best performed from the third-person mode, whilst combat can be enjoyed with all the precision of the first-person view. This split generally works well, as each element is given the right conditions to thrive. Having to keep switching between the two can get a bit irritating though. After you have successfully knocked down a foe, one of the nice touches is that you can capture them (to cash in for a bounty), but when you do this, the camera pans back out to third person view, which in turn renders your shooter obsolete. So you have to manually flick back into first person mode so that you can resume shooting, by which time any remaining enemies will already have chucked darts in your back. Grr and grr again.

Beyond the flaccid early levels, there is plenty of fun to be had. The supposedly menacing 'Stranger' potters around some wild west style villages, populated by talking chickens, and picks up bounty missions, logically, from the bounty stores. He then swaggers (or gallops) from these dusty streets to which ever out-of-town location your target is holed up in, shooting sundry villains before embarking on a boss-battle with aforementioned bad guy. In doing so, the player faces simultaneous platform and shooting challenges, which can make for quite a task. If you want to bring the bosses in alive, for extra moolah, it is more difficult. Unlike the bulk of today's releases, you won't rampage through the first half of this game untested; and some of the latter stages smell distinctly of hardcore. So if you want to complete this game’s full 15-20 hour lifespan, there is fair amount to chew on.