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Back when I previewed Odium, I looked at it as an unfinished product, one that required some work on gameplay tweaking before it could really make a good game. Well, I have the final version now, and I'm sorry to say that the required tweaking never happened - they actually made the game worse.

Odium is an adventure game. Don't let the "action RPG" moniker fool you. You're leading a set of pre-generated characters through a scripted, linear storyline. The only effect you as a player can have on the story is by dying, which stops you from progressing anyway. Think Final Fantasy, not Baldur's Gate. You're walking around the world (which admittedly looks quite good, and sets the atmosphere for the game very well), picking up healing items, ammo, weapons, and key items. The puzzles are ludicrously simple. If you've picked up the correct key item, when you right-click on an obstacle, it gives you the option to use the correct key item. If you haven't, the only option is "close". There are one or two notable exceptions, such as when you have an opportunity to get another character who is holed up in a building, but if you enter he blows himself up. The solution is not immediately obvious, and I wish there were more puzzles of a similar nature. Since all of the obstacles and items glow or are otherwise clearly marked, the adventure portion of this game provides no real challenge.

The items are fairly awkward to keep distributed among your party. You can have anywhere from one to five characters in your party, depending on where you are in the game. However, when you pick up ammo or healing items, they all go to the character who picked them up. There is no "pool" or "split evenly" option (which we've had in RPGs since Pool of Radiance, so their absence here is quite striking), so you have to go into the inventory screen and pass the ammo and heals around to make sure everyone has everything they will need during combats.

The combat difficulty is quite hard. While individual combats near the beginning of the game aren't so bad, later on you will find yourself up against either overwhelming numbers, or against creatures immune to fire, ice, or tranquilization - the three things that even up combat for you. Fire does damage over time, Ice stops an enemy from moving until Fire is used on them, and Tranquilization stuns an enemy for three rounds. Without these things, combat is basically a slugfest - and if any one of your characters drops to zero hit points, the game is over, so it's heavily weighted in the enemies' favor. There are a set number of healing items in the game, too, and even if you collect them all, you'll be hard-pressed to have enough left to survive the later portions of the game. The turn-based combat is also not handled as well as it could be - all of your characters go, then all of the enemy characters go. When there are twelve or so enemies on the map, it's possible for one of your characters to be killed from full health in a single round without you being able to react. I'd have preferred some sort of individual initiative system where each character had a chance to move independently of the rest of the team.

The hallmark of any adventure game is its story. Unfortunately, this is one of the main areas where Odium disappoints. Your team is a group of three NATO marines, one of whom (Cole) is the leader, and the other two of whom apparently don't get along for some reason. However, this is never really explored in the game. Most all interactions between your party members involve the two subordinates trading an insult with each other, and Cole telling them to knock it off. The game features full speech for all character text. This is another low point, as the speech sounds like nothing so much as a poorly dubbed foreign film. The emphasis ends up on entirely the wrong words, and it all ends up sounding fake. The space used on the CD for this speech would have been much better used making the game longer. The poor voice acting only adds to the inability of the player to really get into the story or get attached to the characters, and without that, an adventure game is quite forgettable.

Once you manage to actually save enough stuff from the early battles to survive the later ones, you'll realize another of Odium's weaknesses. The game is SHORT. It'll take most of you about ten hours to beat, and the linear nature of the game makes it so there's no reason to play it more than once. While there are slightly varying plot paths you can take at certain points, such as whether or not you pick up a character, they end up reconverging soon after. That works out to about $4 an hour - not the most efficient use of your gaming dollar.

I dreaded writing this review after playing through Odium. I could tell that there is great potential for a game here - the same sort of game was done VERY well in Squaresoft's Parasite Eve for the Playstation. However, much like Odium, Parasite Eve was way too short. Unlike Odium, it had characters you could identify with and a story that drew you in. If Odium were a console game, I'd recommend it as a renter while you were waiting for something better to come out. Since it's on the PC, and PC games generally aren't rented, I really can't recommend this as a viable purchase at the $40 price point I've seen it at. When Odium hits the $10 bargain bin, it may be worth giving a look if only to pass the time before the next great game comes out. It's just a game engine with unrealized potential right now, though. Hopefully developer Metropolis Software House will take the game interface and engine of Odium, find a better and longer story, and make another game with it.