Abe is back for a third time in 3D and he's brought a friend named Munch.
Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee is the third installation of platform craziness from the Oddworld Inhabitants. The previous two efforts were received on the Sony Playstation and consisted of 2D side scrolling action with some brainteasers thrown in for good measure. It's only fitting that the third game be introduced in full 3D. Unfortunately, while the characters gained even more charm and personality, the gameplay has suffered.
The leap into 3D has been visually kind to the inhabitants of Oddworld. Abe and Munch, the newcomer to the series, look and act almost real enough to touch. The details of the characters and their intricacies are especially noticeable when the camera is zoomed in on them. It's too bad that these camera angles only happen when it's time to tell a little more of the story and not when you're actually playing the game. During the game the camera is usually zoomed out far enough for you to see nearly the whole level. Ah, but what levels they are. The landscapes are comprised of huts, hills, tress, machinery, and water. All which come together to create a very believable world, if not a little repetitive. This is probably also the appropriate time to mention the stunning FMVs. It's no stretch to say that these may be the most impressive, hilarious, and well-directed movies I've ever seen in a game. If memory serves, the original movie from the first game was up for an Academy Award for animated short at the time. It's only gotten better.
Aurally, the characters you control communicate with others through "gamespeak". Sound, or more to the point, voice, plays a big part in your adventure because of this communication. The voices are all fantastic, easily better than any Saturday morning cartoon show. A high emphasis is placed on hearing the voices, so you won't be concerned about the blips and zaps of the sound effects or the music.
While Munch's Oddysee is an overall stellar package of audio and visuals, it stumbles a bit when it comes to playing through the game. You play as both Abe and Munch on a journey with a common goal of saving the species that Munch belongs to (and is the last of). While you start off with each character working on their own storyline, they eventually bump into each other. Once they do, they must work in tandem to tackle each obstacle by playing to their strengths. Switching between the two characters is as easy as pressing a button and having them move together only requires you to speak "hello" to your partner.
Some of the tasks you must perform are similar to the past games such as finding your friends and leading them to escape portals, but everything is handled just a little differently in the third dimension. For starters, the analog control is a little too sensitive for some of the fine tuned walking and jumping you need to do. There is a fine line between tip toeing, walking and full speed running. There are cases where you'd like to walk a fine line but push the tiniest bit too far on the stick and your character runs top speed by a lever or off a ledge. This affects jumping as well since you often need to jump onto a small platform or into a well.
My biggest complaint is that Munch's Oddysee just gets monotonous. The whole game goes from one puzzle to the next with little more than an FMV thrown in to mix it up. You perform all the same actions on each stage, just in a different pattern. Some stages are also too vague. Others require you to sit back and possess and kill all the enemies in the room before you move on, which is neither fun nor challenging. It just doesn't capture the sneakiness and simplistic complexity of the first two games.
That's not to say that Munch is a bad game. Like I said earlier, it really brought the characters more to life, which is a feat in itself considering how tangible they were before. Likewise, the puzzles and stages aren't necessarily bad, they just grow tedious as you progress. It's definitely a step in the right direction as 3D can offer new directions to take the zany cast from Oddworld, but Oddworld Inhabitants have their work cut out for them to re-capture the spirit of the gameplay that drew us in the first time we met Abe.
