Debuting during Sony’s 2017 Paris Games Week showcase, and
releasing the same day, Oure made a heck of a first impression as the next
beautiful adventure game cut from the same cloth as Journey, Abzu, or RiME. Featuring a child that can change into a dragon at will and freely and playfully fly
through the clouds while chasing down massive Titans, Oure definitely seems
like it has all of the makings of the next indie hit. The execution, however,
falters a bit. The camera is poor, the controls are wonky, the battles against
the Titans are frustrating, and the overwhelming amount of videogame-y
collectibles littering the world is, frankly, off-putting. Oure still has some
moments of beauty and wonder and fun but actually getting to them is a slog.
See our full Oure PS4 review for all of the details.Game Details
- Publisher: Heavy Spectrum Limited
- Developer: Heavy Spectrum Limited
- ESRB Rating: “E” for Everyone
- Genre: Adventure
- Pros: Wonderful sense of flying; pretty clouds; massive Titans
- Cons: Titan fights are awful; overwhelming amount of “stuff”; blurry
- MSRP: $20
Oure is the tale of a child – in my game it was a little
redheaded girl, but a boy is also available – living in a dark and depressing
city but who dreams of flying through the clouds. One day her parents take her
to a tower with a doorway made of light and, as the child passes through, they
end up in the world of bright fluffy clouds from their dreams. Not only are
they in a new world in the clouds, but they can also turn into a Chinese dragon
at will and fly around. Their new task is to free eight massive Titans hidden
among the clouds and bring peace back to their city.
Once you actually take the controls, Oure is very promising
at the start. You can instantly turn into a dragon and fly around and it feels
pretty good. Those initial good feelings don’t last long, however, as once the
real game starts the problems start adding up. One of the first things you’re
asked to do is hold the square button to reveal your next objective – the first
Titan. This blast of energy not only reveals the location of the Titan, or
rather the tower you need to reach to call it, but also blinking indicators for
hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of collectibles scattered around the world
as well. You only need to collect 140 of the 700+ scattered blue orbs to summon
all 8 Titans and beat the game, but you’ll need a lot more to access the myriad
of upgrades to your stamina and other abilities.
The problem with this is that all of the potential magic and
wonder of the game is immediately gone from that moment on as Oure becomes just
another videogame full of stuff to collect. Journey and Abzu are so great
because they’re subtle and exploration is organic. Your attention is naturally
drawn to the proper path and your next objective is clear without screaming in
your face about it. Oure is pretty much the opposite. You’re overwhelmed with
stuff and the game feels like a chore right from the start. Like I said, you
don’t have to collect all of the orbs to finish the game, but I argue that the
experience would have been exactly the same – or even greatly improved – by not
having the orbs at all.
For the most part, your time with Oure is split into two
parts – flying around and collecting orbs or finding upgrade platforms, and
fighting Titans. For the former, the controls feel okay. You can fly fairly
freely wherever you want, though you only have a limited amount of stamina so
you have to be careful when trying to climb up to higher layers of clouds. The
world is full of orbs, as mentioned, but also birds and creatures you can
interact with, puzzles that have you flying through rings, and a handful of
other hidden collectibles that add bits and pieces to the story.
For the other part of the game – fighting Titans – Oure’s
controls don’t feel quite as good. The Titans are all in the form of different
giant animals – birds, giant insects, manta rays, among others – and your
objective is to fly all over them to destroy crystals, which calms the Titan
down so they’ll help you out later. The problems are multiple in these battles,
unfortunately. The Titans don’t want you crawling around on them, so they’ll
turn and twist and speed up in order to prevent you from reaching the crystals.
This is a frustrating pain in the butt because the camera is terrible and can’t
keep up a lot of the time, but your movement controls are also not nearly
precise enough. Flying around feels great when you’re in open air, but when you
have to dodge lasers and avoid obstacles and try to get close to a crystal to
grab it, it all falls apart. Another problem is that destroying the crystals
involves doing weird line puzzles like you’re playing The Witness, but they
aren’t explained very well and get significantly more difficult the deeper into
the game you get.
The result is a pretty disappointing experience all around.
The exploration is wholly unsatisfying because you’re overwhelmed with
collectibles that seem arbitrarily mouse-dropped in at random without much
thought and the Titan fights, which should be the highlights of the experience,
are clunky and frustrating and not fun. Oure, admirably, set its sights sky
high but doesn’t really come close to reaching the titles it was clearly
influenced by.
Presentation-wise, Oure is decent overall, though an extreme
overuse of blur and a ridiculously close draw distance do spoil the visuals a
bit. The fluffy clouds and different colored lighting as the game progresses
really looks beautiful. The Titans also look pretty darn cool as well. It’s all
so darn blurry, though, and the orbs and other objects only really becoming
visible seemingly right in front of your eyes is weird. I guess that’s why they
put in the “hold square to reveal all objects” feature – because you wouldn’t
know where anything was otherwise. The sound fares better with a very solid
soundtrack.
All in all, Oure is pretty disappointing, which is a
shame. The trailer showed off an epic Journey-like experience but the actual
game is clunky and frustrating and so lacking in subtlety that it’s just a
letdown. Don't get me wrong, Oure isn't bad, it's just disappointing compared to the games it was inspired by. Skip it.
Disclosure: A review code was provided by the publisher.
