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Im a longtime fan of shmups. R-Type, Gradius V and U.N. Squadron, 1943 and the more recent DeathSmiles and Akai Katana are some of my faves. After months of procrastinating I finally caved and bought this game. What a disappointment. Here's why:
1) In every shooter one of the most important things is to make sure the player can tell the difference in foreground/backgrond graphics, as well as being able to clearly see enemy bullets. OE does an amazing job of ruining that conceptobjects that look like youll crash into you'll go right through and vise versa, and enemy bullets are so hard to see against the bright backgrounds its impossible to tell whats going on.
2) Unlimited continues from the get-go and bosses that "run-away" after 3 or 4 minutes makes no sense. I just beat the game on a 2nd play-through doing this before writing this review. All you have to do is hit Start to continue when needed and you can beat the game just like that.
3) Voice acting. Its fine for some games but this in particular its like they got some 10 year old girl with the highest pitched voice to squeak out dialogue. There is a TON of chatter throughout the game and it doesn't let up much at all. I turned it all the way down, only to find out that when you die there's no voice going "ahhh!!" anymore, but there's no explosion sound to signify i got hit. Your character just slowwwwwwwwly falls toward you then off-screen to the left.
4)Your main gun shoots two bullets on screen at once. Two bullets. Thats it. Good luck trying to defeat a boss if this ever happens. (Oh wait! Just refer to #2, silly me!).
5)I paid just $12 for the disc (still a rip-off) but apparently there are 25 pieces of paid DLC. Not only that, the paid DLC consists of the usual gamerpics, skins, extra stages, extra characters, and...music tracks?!?! And the music tracks are.....440 points ($5.50). EACH. SERIOUSLY. Go look on xbox.com yourself. This is an insult, especially for such a niche market these days they have to nickel and dime us to death? Hey Konami, you do you think you are? Capcom?
6) There's this odd text bar that resides above your weapon layout, (bottom left of screen). So when certain characters are yabbering in Japanese it scrolls
the English text. Its small and hard to read but most importantly for a game like this its distracting with no option to turn off. Also, for each music track that plays it will show the song title and composer on the bottom right of the screen. Oh, and cant be turned off either.
7)To piggyback on parts of #5 and #6, the music sucks. Especially the boss musicdoesnt fit in at all. Not even in a Parodius kind-of-weird, (that game was actually fun and had some cool tunes though). OE is just blah and boring.
Id give this game zero stars if I could. Please dont make the same mistake I did. Buy DeathSmiles instead. Or DeathSmiles IIX off Games on Demand. Or Akai Katana. Or Espgaluda II. All are for Xbox 360 and are wonderful shoot-em-ups/shmups that are worth your time and money. Not this worthless piece of garbage!
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They totally blew it in a bad way. Instead of bringing us a souped-up Gradius or a crazier/zanier Parodius, we get this weird game. Now, I'm not completely against the idea of making more side-scrolling shoot-'em-ups, as they are not as popular as the vertical scrollers, but this one is definitely not representative of what is best about the genre. To add insult to injury, you end up feeling like you bought "part" of the game because of all the damn DLC they tried to shank their customers with: You have to download certain levels, download characters, download this, download that... what a buncha crap. The graphics aren't all that great either, sort of a mix of 2D and 3D I hate 3D and I can't recall the music at all. I wouldn't recommend this game to anyone. I only got it because it was free with "rewards points" from my credit card and I'm a bit of a completist. Am I glad I didn't shell out for the import copy.Bollocks to your DLC, Konami!
Best Deals for Otomedius Excellent - Xbox 360
Otomedius is a horizontally scrolling shooter which touts itself as the successor to Konami's classic Gradius series. While it shares many of the base gameplay features as this legendary series, it unfortunately suffers many problems which results in a very mediocre experience.Just to name a few, due to the size of your player character on the screen, it can become extremely difficult to correctly gauge your hitbox, especially on the harder difficulties when the screen is full of projectiles.
While the 2-D artwork which permeates the game is well done, the actual 3D models used within the game itself are very lackluster. This becomes especially apparent during times when the game zooms in during cutscenes.
The multiplayer aspect of the game is also a disappointment. The game does not allow for two people to play together in the normal "Story" mode of the game. Rather, the only way to play with friends is in a specific "Multiplayer" mode, where the second player is not able to gain experience, and no continues are allowed. So, you are completely out of luck if you want to just play the normal game with a friend.
The boss fights in the game can also be a source of frustration. While the bosses are not too difficult, they tend to have an unusually high amount of health, and it is a near impossibility to hit some of their weak points without using certain specific weapons. As a result, many of the weapons available to you are largely worthless, as it is nearly impossible to defeat the bosses using them before you run out of time.
While each of these complaints, when taken alone, are not horrendous faults, the fact that so many minor poor game design choices exist at once just makes the game seem amateurish. If the company behind the game was new, or at least new to making this genre of game, then it could almost be excused. But this game was made by Konami, a company whose experience making shooters stretches back over twenty five years. And while this game so proudly declares its decent from the Gradius series on the cover, the simple fact of the matter is that Gradius V, a game that was released nearly seven years before on an inferior console, completely surpasses Otomedius Excellent in pretty much every possible way.
The game does boast a decent, if not particularly memorable, soundtrack that has a decent amount of songs from classic Konami titles. And the large amount of playable characters, coupled with a copious amount of unlockables, does give it a fair amount of replay value. Trying to obtain all of the weapons in the game will definitely provide plenty of entertainment to fans who enjoy the collection aspect of games. I feel it is important to warn, however, that the game relies quite heavily on the use of paid DLC. In fact, two characters, who were quite prominently displayed in both the promotion of the game as well as the intro movie of the game itself, are only accessible by paying separately for them once you have already purchased the game.
One final important note is that the game's visual aesthetic was very clearly designed to cater entirely to a very specific group of fans. And it is very likely that your enjoyment of the game may drastically increase or decrease based entirely on whether or not you happen to belong to this group. I will say, though, that with the amount of minor problems prevalent throughout this title, one would almost wish that they had spent less time worrying about the visual appeal of the characters, and more on ironing out the actual gameplay.
Honest reviews on Otomedius Excellent - Xbox 360
There's really not much to say about the game except it's alright if you're looking for a classic star fighter 2D game,had a gift card so figured why not and for the price not all bad just not great either.Don't expect any of the regular gameplay we expect from today's games obviously as all you really do is shoot the enemy fighters until the boss battle at the end of the level though you will give a chuckle or two at some of the voice comments from the characters in the game intentional or not.
If you can get the game under $10 I'd say go for it though even $10 maybe a little much for this game still if you're looking for a classic style of starfighter shooter type games overall it's not too bad.
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