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The Nomad Soul Review
Noel Brady
00/12/0000
The Nomad Soul
The Nomad Soul has been a long time in development, and while this process has, for the most part, been low-key, its name did keep resurfacing. This is mainly due to its links with David Bowie, whoo appears in the game and, together with Reeves Gabrels, provides a large chunk of the soundtrack. Some of you may be wondering about a game called Omikron which Bowie was apparently invloved in, well The Nomad Soul is actually Omikron. The name was changed just before release.
The theme of the game, and one which it shares to some extent with Shiny's Messiah, is reincarnation. You have the possession of the body of one of the characters. If you die, your sould will possess the body of the last person you touched whoever they may be. This is an interesting gameplay concept, but Nomad Soul doesn't seem to be as keen to exploit it as Messiah, so much so that it foten feels more like a secondary feature than a key element of the plot.
The game is split roughly into two parts: adventure and action. The first sees you wandering through the city of Omikron, talking to characters and solving puzzles, while the action sequences consist mainly of combat (fighting-game style), and a scattering of first-person shhoter-type sections. Unfortunately, unlike the adventure sections, these are poorly implemented and suffer from dodgy controls and a lack of gameplay.
The adventure component of the game is not without its problems either. Sometimes it's hard to tell what you're supposed to be doing, and the control system can cause problems as you get stuck on small bits of scenery or are run over by a car as you look around. Some of the objects are annoyingly difficult to manipulate, too, especially when your character refuses to believe there is an object there to use unless they are directly in front of it.
Omikron tries hard to be a very believable world. The whole city is modelled, and the people go about their daily lives around you. Unfortunately, this leads to some rather annoying problems; since the game shows you all of these people and areas, it is frustrating not to be able to interact with them. Most players, I suspect, would prefer the world of something like Final Fantasy, where there may only be a hundred non-playable characters, but at leat each one has something to say or do. In Nomad Soul there are a few thousand characters, all of whom act too busy to talk to you.
This problem is exacerbated by the fact that when you do find someone you can talk to, there are generally only a handful of conversation options open to you. To top it all off, characters do a fairly plausible Thunderbirds impression when you converse with them, jerking their arms around wildly in a desperate attempt to convey emotion. The audo is good though; the soundtrack suits the game well, and the speech and effects are also of a very high standard.
The graphics in Nomad Soul are nice; the locations are modelled well (even if some of the areas are barren), and the characters move well. Unfortunately, this game has one massive flaw which makes it painful to play-- it's really slow! Even on a high-spec PC (a PII/400 with 128Mb RAM and a TNT2 Ultra) we had to turn the detail settings right down to get an acceptable frame rate in outside ideas. I dread to think what the game would run like on a machine with minimum specifications.
While the graphics look gorgeous with the detail turned up, the frame rate is abysmal (in the order of 1 to 2 seconds per frame on the above machine). The price you pay for it to be playable is that it looks as though the entire city has been immersed in a thick white fog, which is not just annoying and ugly, but, from a practical point of view, makes navigation incredibly tricky. The combination of a lack of speed and the other minor flaws in the game make it hard to recommend it. It might be worthwhile if you happen to be a big arcade-adventure fan with a killer machine, but anyone else should steer clear. In a year or so, when we've got the machines to run it, perhaps you could pick it out of your local bargain bin.
