A 2.5D Zelda clone for the PC that isn’t quite as good as Zelda.
You wanted more?
Fine.
Oceanhorn is a game about a kid who is looking for his dad. His dad took off to face off with Oceanhorn, the last of the Living Fortresses, great monsters which were left behind by an ancient civilization. Your goal is to go from island to island in search of your dad.
The core gameplay is very familiar to Zelda fans – you have a sword and a shield. You wander around stabbing stuff. While the game has 3D graphics, it is fundamentally 2D – indeed, it is a major gameplay mechanic that you can fall down one “floor” worth of blocks, and can only go up via stairs. This is pretty much how all the dungeons are arranged, and numerous puzzles center around your inability to jump.
This is not a sophisticated game – you walk around and slash stuff with your sword. There is no Z-targeting or anything of the sort, but the game does have a sort of auto-aim feature.
Over the course of the game, you acquire items – bombs (for blowing stuff up), a bow and arrow (for shooting targets to trigger stuff, as well as certain enemies), a fishing rod (because what is Zelda without fishing?), boots (for jumping over one-square gaps)… really, exactly the most basic items you’d expect in a Zelda game. You also get spells – a fire spell, a spell that drops stuff on switches, an ice spell to freeze stuff which seemed unnecessary, a cure spell that I only used on the final boss, and a black hole spell that is super overpowered but useless on bosses.
That said, the game is pretty easy, and the puzzles basic. There’s nothing here that you haven’t seen before many times.
And that’s really the problem with the game – it is nothing new. It is just a kind of mediocre Zelda-ish game that doesn’t do anything new, just sort of treads the usual ground. The bosses are nothing impressive, the ordinary enemies are mostly boring and samey (and you find them a lot – there isn’t a whole bunch of variety, having even less variety than Zelda games), the environments didn’t feel that varied (you’re on a bunch of islands, but few of them feel unique)… really, there’s just very little here to excite you.
It isn’t bad, and the voice acting is decent (even if the script is often not great), but there’s just little here to get excited about. You’ve probably played Zelda, and if you haven’t, this isn’t a great introduction to the genre – games like Darksiders felt like they were much more interesting new interpretations of the Zelda formula than this was. This was same old, same old, and fairly mediocre. There’s nothing great about it, and while it isn’t bad, there’s little to recommend.
2.0