This game is suprisingly "not bad"

User Rating: 7.2 | Obscure XBOX
By byshop | Review Date:
Ahh, I can remember a time (not that long ago, mind you) when you could glean certain information about a new game just from looking at its price when it first comes out. The formula was easy, even for non-math nerds such as myself. Here’s now it went: Game price=> $50 = anywhere from bad to good. No way to know till you buy it. Game price=< $49 = abject crap, guaranteed In the last year, though, some smaller developers have managed to squeak out a few titles for under $40 that have actually been halfway decent, if not pretty darned good. Katamari Damacy retailed new for a wallet crippling $20 and was one of the most original games of the year. Similarly priced, Obscure is a rare find. A survival horror title released at a discount price, it’s surprisingly… well… not too bad. Note that I didn’t say “good.” It’s not that it’s not good, it’s just that there are definite signs that this wasn’t the result of a massive financial investment. In spite of this, it’s actually a fair sight better other recent survival horror games that cost much more. It may not have the sheer technical prowess of Cold Fear’s rolling ship deck and storm effects, but in my opinion it’s a much more “playable” game. Obscure follows the story of five high school students who find themselves in a nightmare of mutating monsters, evil scientific plots, and other general unpleasantness in their very own high school. Kenny disappears from school (OH MY GOD, THEY KIDNAPPED KENNY! YOU BASTARDS!) and it’s left to the four remaining friends to try to rescue their lost chum. There are five playable characters you can pick from, although since Kenny is technically one of them you can only choose from four in the beginning. Each character has their own special trait. Kenny (jock and kidnapee extraordinaire) can run fast and brawl well as well as absorb a little more damage than the others. Stan (hacker and ebonics for white people proponent) can open any pickable lock nearly instantly. Ashley (Kenny’s girlfriend and miscellaneous malcontent) can whack the crap out of most things with extra melee and firearm attacks. Perhaps the most useful two in my humble opinion were Shannon (Kenny’s sister and fashion victim) and Josh (midget journalist: more on that later). Shannon has the ability to yield better results from health supplies. She can also provide context sensitive dialog lines regarding what you might need to do next or how to solve a puzzle at the push of a button. These lines can range from the inane “Let’s search around for clues!” to the usefully specific “I think I remember seeing the keypad this combination goes to in the northwest courtyard!” The game lets you take two characters at a time, the second being an AI tag-a-long. That is, unless of course you have a friend sitting next to you with an Xbox controller in hand eagerly looking at you and grinning like a maniac. If this is the case, then you can sample: CO-OP play! In Co-Op, both characters controls as they would in the single player game. There is no splitscreen, but rather the camera focuses on the main character as it does in single player, although each character has the option of usurping the camera’s focus by hitting the black button. Supplies, puzzle items and ammo are all shared, but weapon inventories are separate. There is no friendly fire that I’ve noticed, and there’s a blue pointer that indicates which direction the second character is when they are offscreen. If either character leaves the room, the other follows forcibly. The game suffers from many of the problems that plague many survival horror games, but it also learns from the mistakes of others. Camera angles can be downright annoying, especially in Co-op mode. In an attempt at a cinematic feel, there’s no persistent HUD. Inventory management appears when you select it, but it doesn’t pause the game. This is a good thing in co-op play, but a bad thing when you need to switch from your empty handgun to an alternate weapon because you’re about to get your head bitten off. Most annoyingly, there’s no life bar. From the status screen you can get a relative idea of how damaged your character is by how bloody their portrait is, but from in game controller vibration is your only indicator. This is a real pain since your characters don’t take all that much damage before they die. Once you lose a character (and it -will- happen) you can head back to the “gathering place” where the remaining unused characters sit around staring blankly into space and choose a new teammate to accompany you. Once you run out of “Scoobies” in reserve and you lose your last character, the game ends. Like many Co-op games such as Tales of Symphonia on the GC, the Co-Op mode feels a little tacked on at times. It works well most of the time, but occasionally little oversights creep into the gameplay. You can save your co-op games, but under certain circumstances the game can become confused when reloading as to which character belongs on which controller, and there’s no easy way to swap characters (especially when you are down to your last two) short of trading controller ports. This game appears to have originally been written in French and then translated to English. While many gamers already deal with “Engrish” in the form of poorly translated Japanese games, badly translated French games aren’t much better. Here’s an example: Josh is described in the manual like so: “Josh Carter is the typical small reporter who spends his leisure time reading science fiction novels and working on his movies.” Although I’m sure the word “town” was supposed to be in there, it makes Josh sound as though he’s just little. For all the little things that Obscure does wrong, it does do quite a few right. It has a good maping function that works similar to those found in Silent Hill. You characters can walk while aiming, a complaint levied at every RE title up until Outbreak 2. Flashlights can be attached to any of your weapons (provided you have sufficient tape) and actually augment the weapons when fighting monsters of darkness. One very handy feature is that the game allows you to unload ammo from weapons to return it to the pool. This is very handy for sharing with your teammate or removing ammo from a less powerful weapon so that it may be loaded in a more powerful weapon that uses ammo of the same type. The game isn’t terribly long (I haven’t beaten it, but I’m fairly certain I’m close) and it has a nice horror movie vibe to it. The graphics aren’t spectacular, but they certainly don’t -detract- from the game. A couple licensed songs flesh out the soundtrack in cut scenes, but otherwise the music is original at atmospheric if not terribly memorable. I'm putting difficulty down as "Hard" just because the game can widely vary from relatively easy combat to sudden bouts of you-get-gang-banged-the-second-you-enter-the-wrong-room-and-lose-one- or-both-of-your-characters- before-you-know-what-happened-ism, but overall I wouldn't call it a hard game. Overall this is a decent little diversion for the $20 you’ll plunk down on it, and even possibly a “must buy” for anyone else who’s been jonesing for a co-op survival horror game that can be played on one console (I bought a second PS2, two copies of RE: O and two PS2 HDs just so me and my roomie could play co-op Resident Evi). For anyone who’s not a fan of the genre, however, this probably isn’t going to make a convert out of you.

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