Review by Jon Donnis
ONI: Road to be the Mightiest Oni feels like it should be Early Access, but I cant see any note of that on the Steam page, therefore I will have to treat it as a final release.
Created by a team of 5 developers, over 2 years, the game has been designed to give the plaer the feel that they have jumped into the pages of a childhood picture book. You play on Kisejima Island, a relatively small area.
You play as demon warrior Kuuta, and later on as his partner Kazemaru, gameplay mainly consists of exploring the area, collecting items and challenging the phantoms of demons that appear across the island. As you defeat your enemies and collect their souls, you will unlock new areas to play in. Eventually you will need to defeat the evil monster Momotaro.
You fight against the demons by attacking them with your club, once defeated you switch to Kazemaru who then sucks the spirit out of the demon's body, and boom you just defeated a demon. You can even control both characters at the same time using joysticks on a gamepad.
Collect mushrooms, and pieces of paper, upgrade your club, take part in missions, and so on.
In game artwork is by Kensei Design, and everything looks very nice. There is also some pretty catchy songs playing as you play.
So how does the game play? And I hate to do this, but I have to be honest, at the start of this review I mentioned about how it feels like it should be Early Access, that is because at its core the game is broken. Control is a nightmare, fights are far from intuitive, just moving the character about feels difficult, you will get stuck just walking up a hill. The fights themselves are actually the only thing that seems to work ok, but when you need to run away from an enemy, that control issues makes it so frustratingly bad.
The frame rate is also a problem, optimisation is very poor, for what is a small download, it should work so much better.
When you don't move everything looks great.
There is great potential here, I like the general look of the game, the soundtrack, and the idea, but it is just so poorly finished off, that it is nowhere near ready to be released, even as Early Access I would say this isn't ready.
I hate to speak badly about an Indie Game, but this is just not ready for release, and at £24.99 on Steam, that price is ridiculously high.
The Good
Graphics and general aesthetics are very good, the soundtrack is also of a high quality.
The Bad
The gameplay, the optimisation, the controls, pretty much everything else.
Overall
For such a nice looking game, I am left incredibly disappointed in this, I would expect that they will fix the bugs, release updates etc, but I fear that many people will be put off before the game is anywhere near an acceptable finished article. This game is a long way from being release ready.
I wont give ONI: Road to be the Mightiest Oni on PC a score, as I dont like to kick someone when they are down, and the reviews on Steam are horrific.
I wish the developers all the best on this, and I hope after a year or so, if they stick with it, listen to the complaints and improve this game, then get in contact with me again and I will give the game a fresh review.
If you want to check it out you can at
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