Hello everyone and welcome back to Kralizec Gaming.Today we are going to take a look at Omega Strike. This pixelart metroidvania like platformer promises a huge open world and great gameplay. Whether it can deliver on this promise it the question we will try to answer today. It is available on Steam for 12 Euros and 99 cents or your regional equivalent.
With this review you have a choice of either reading it here in text form or listening to the video review. They both contain the same content.

Video Review

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Text Review

Before I get into the review I should mention that this game has been provided to me by the developer for free.

So, a metroidvania styled platformer with pixelart graphics. Well, I’m not usually into platformer that much, but I loved Hallow Knight last year and this game seems to be in a very similar genre. And with graphics that do speak to me very much as I personally also dabble into occasionally creating pixelart and also do resemble once of my favorite arcade games – Metal Slug. So let’s go and see whether this game is a good buy or not.

Gameplay

And as is the norm, we will start by looking over the mechanics and how they feel.
At it’s core, Omega Strike is your basic action platformer set in the near future. That means you will get your share of sci-fi, but also “realistic” guns. Your character, or more specifically characters, are the ones who will be predominately using the weapons more fitting towards realism and the enemies will of course using a combination of the same and a few more futuristic weapons.
At the very center of Omega Strike’s mechanics is the character swap mechanics. You as the player have access to three playable character at the start, but two of them are taken away from you after the prologue and you have to get them back. The first character, and the one you get to keep after the prologue, is Sarge, just a guy who had an assault rife. Then we have Bear with a grenade launcher and the ability to push boulders and last but not least there is Dex with a Shotgun and a double jump.

These characters then get a few upgrades, that can be put into two basic categories. Pure stat updates – those are there for your weapons and are for the damage and range of the weapons and are bought with gold you find around the game. And then there are a few upgrades you get as drops from bosses. These are usually movement abilities that allow you to get to parts of the game you haven‘t been able to reach before.

This swap between characters is very welcomed, as it provides three very different playstyles that are all needed to complete the game. Though I will have two complaints about the mechanic. First of all, I really don’t like the fact that you are presented with the mechanic at the start, get some time to play around with it and say to yourself “Well, this seems pretty awesome!”, but then the game just takes this feature away from you and forces you to play for a decent amount of time without this feature.
The second thing I didn‘t like that much is about the movement abilities you get from few of the bosses. They feel like a missed opportunity as they aren‘t really used for anything else then to get to parts of the game you haven‘t been able to get to. Let me give you guys two examples. One of the abilities that Sarge gets is the ability to destroy certain blocks with his gunfire. This could have also easily been translated into penetrating bullets. Or Dex, who gets a little Dash to traverse areas that would have either been to large to get over with his double jump, but it‘s just left there, instead of giving it like a small immunity frames, giving the developers an option to just make the bosses even harder.

The second largest… well I wouldn‘t really call it a mechanic, it‘s more a feature this time, is the open world, which is composed of 5 main maps that then branch out into different sections. And yeah, the open world is really really big. And as is the standard in metroidvania games, there is a huge amount of backtracking involved as you need to gather the movement abilites to get to new branches of the map, to gather more movement abilities to allow you to get to more branches of the map…. You see where I‘m going with this right?

I will be honest with you guys, I‘m not the biggest fan of backtracking in games, but I do understand that it is a common feature of metroidvania games. And once I realized that using the item that teleports you back to the main hub is the way to go rather then going back on foot, the game became much more pleasurable. But I do still wish the quick travel systém in game was a bit more fleshed out.

And lastly, there’s the combat. And it’s pretty simplistic. You just shoot your enemies and avoid their attacks. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy, not by any stretch of the imagination. The trick to making it easier for yourself is picking the right character to fight the right enemies. For example, Sarge is the best for “sniping” enemies from half screen away because of his superior range, Bear is the only one who can kill enemies that are at lower platforms then you are and Dex just has the highest DPS and his double jump allows you to kill enemies way higher then you are.
And apart from fighting regular monsters, you have the bossses. There is one for each branch of the map and two for the last section. So a quite decent number of them. They are pretty nice and require you to learn their moveset for sure. Sadly, I again have one problem with them. Once you collect all the characters and you are free to use whichever one you want, it soon becomes clear that using Dex – the shotgun wielding, double jumping character – is just superior. Not only is the double jump often the one way to avoid attacks from the bosses, but his high DPS also means you kill the bosses quicker. Once I got him, I used him almost exclusively to kill bosses with the exception of ONE phase on two bosses where on one I had to use Bear as the boss was bellow you and then on the very last boss where being close just wasn’t an option. Giving bosses phases that require you to use different characters, just like these two had it would solve this issue, sadly, it didn’t really happen here.

It may seem like I have a lot of issues with Omega Strike, but the thing is, they aren’t really problems that would be hugely taking away from the fun. And some of them might not even be problem for you. You might be okay with getting a glimpse of what you can do before losing it. You might be okay with a lot of backtracking in game. You might not care that there is a character who is better at boss fights. But it is my duty as a game reviewer to point these potential problems out. And at the same time, it is my duty to tell you that the core gameplay is actually fun and satisfying.

Graphics

Okay, that’s pretty much all I had to say about the mechanics and gameplay and it’s now time to move on to the graphics.
Omega Strike uses a very classy looking pixelart style that might seem underwhelming at first, but as you play more of Omega Strike, you get to understand how much beauty can be found in simple things. If there would be something I’d compare it to, it would probably be the old arcade classic Metal Slug.

Music

Now it’s time to check the music of Omega Strike and it’s pretty nice to be honest. It’s a nice 8-bit soundtrack. Not special in anyway, but it works pretty well.

Performance

Performance wise Omega Strike worked very well, no crashes, no bugs and it also ran well, but that was to be expected as it is a 2D game that could run on any cell phone these days.

Conclusion

So, in conclusion: Omega Strike is good metroidvania game with a few flaws. But none of those flaws are really something that would make the game not fun to play. And that’s really important. If you like pixelart, 8-bit music and metroidvania games or just action platformers in general, Omega Strike is certainly a game you should try it out. The value proposition is also decent as it took me about 11 hours to finish the game on regular difficulty and there still is the hard difficulty if I wanted to go through that.

So, that’s it for today guys. Hope you like the review and if you did, please consider upvoting the review and following my blog. And comment, if you have something you would like to add. See you guys later with more gaming content.

disclaimer: All the images have been taken directly of the Steam game page