NOMAD SOUL (Omikron)

                 Reviewed by Stefan Herber

I'm breaking my golden rule for once - only to review games I have
completed. For it is quite important to discuss this new David
Bowie inspired effort, as for a while I thought it was going to be
one of the best games I had ever played.

In "Nomad Soul", or "Omikron" as it is sometimes called, you are a
computer game player who is transplanted to a foreign place
several hundred years in the future by a dying policeman who
visits you via your computer screen. Now that has got to be a
first!  The future is very bleak (can anyone recall a sci-fi game
where the future was rosy?) with the world being a totalitarian
state controlled by a computer and his cronies. It doesn't take
long before you, who are a law enforcer, join a band of rebels to
fight back.


The game is very ambitious being a mixture of shooting sequences …
la Duke Nukem (although never too difficult), adventure and arcade
with some lovely all out Thai boxing rules. I usually can't stand
arcade and I'm well past my "Doom" days but the sequences are so
well integrated that you can only admire.  The story is strong and
intriguing and the puzzles gratifying, if a tad on the easy side.
The game looks beautiful and you even get a chance to attend a
David Bowie concert. There's no autosave as such - you have to
pick up magical rings, which can only be used at certain points.
However you soon have so many of these you'll hardly notice.

So - what's the crunch? Why haven't I finished it? Well, whenever
I start a new game the first thing I do is see if a patch is
available.  None - good - they got it right the first time.

But they didn't. After finishing two-thirds of the game it
persistently crashed in the same place. So I dutifully renewed my
drivers - no effect. Contacted Eidos who advised me to update my
drivers...  To make this worse, the point the game crashed was at
the end of a 20 minute fairly difficult action sequence which I
had to replay again and again once appropriate changes to my
system were made - only for it to crash again.

I've therefore had enough. If there are brave souls out there
prepared to risk the same thing I can only say that I think this
is a very good game. On the other hand would you deliberately only
read the first four acts of Hamlet?












                              - o -