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Omikron: The Nomad Soul is a deeply-flawed game that took decent ideas and executed them poorly. The one good thing this game has going for it is its atmosphere and music. The different cities of Omikron are enjoyable to explore, and many NPCs will give you exposition and background for the city you're visiting if you talk to them. The slider (car for fast-traveling) is convenient and helps a great deal when trying to figure out where a mission is telling you to go. The variety of locations is decent for this style of game, and it's always fun to discover new areas you didn't think were accessible.
The save system is awful. Save points are only found in specific areas, and saving your game costs in-game money. If that's not bad enough, the game tries to offer you "hints" which cost the equivalent of ten game-saves each, but the hints are almost never worth their cost. Your inventory is limited for no reason other than to force you to store items in a computer. However, oftentimes a mission will call for an item you received a lot earlier in the game, which creates confusion and difficulty with completion assuming that the item you need ended up in computer storage.
Controls are just awful. First-person shooter sections require extremely precise aiming, but the camera doesn't move up or down very far and makes it difficult to hit targets at awkward angles. Although the game emphasizes buying guns in storesor unlocking secret ones, such as the megazooka in the gun shop in Jaunpur, I found that the only gun you ever needed was the Waver Gun you receive at the beginning of the game. FPS levels are designed to frustrate the hell out of you, especially given the bad controls, with enemies that appear out of thin air right behind you, and others that are placed in respawn zones and shoot at you before you can start moving. The shooting levels are also full of glitches, includinga few game-breaking ones, including one in the boss battle beyond Commandant Gandhar's office, and another in the Tetra Trust base. Make sure you save your game often, unless you enjoy losing an hour of your time to an unavoidable glitch.
In the 1v1 fights, characters will sometimes glitch through the walls. A majority of these fights boil down to spamming combos until the enemy dies, and the controls are uncomfortable which causes the outcome of a fight to feel out of your control. The game tries to include RPG elements, such as using potions to level up fighting stats and training to learn new combos, but these things don't matter because you're forced to swap bodies with other characters. A significant mechanic in this game is that you can choose to reincarnate into other people, leaving your previous body behind and taking on a new character with different stats. The problem is that if you spent money, collected items, or trained your previous character to get better at fighting, it all goes down the drain as soon as your soul moves into a new body. To make matters worse, switching bodies will sometimes change the amount of money or ammo you have in your inventory. The game also doesn't give you much choice in this matter, becauseseveral parts of the story require you to transform into someone else in order to pass a mission or progress the story.
Game mechanics will randomly change throughout the game. In most games, mechanics are established and remain consistent throughout the game to help the player figure out how to navigate a mission. In Omikron, mechanics change whenever the game developers feel like it. For example,the game has many sections that require you to climb up walls. For the most part, wall-climbing is indicated by rocks that are barely visible in the side of a wall. However, in Jahangir Park you need to get a bird feather to make a potion. Birds are sitting in an inaccessible location, but you're somehow supposed to know to climb up the side of a dirt wall with no indication that it can be climbed. Some missions require you to decipher codes or do math, but the in-game font is nearly impossible to read. In one mission at the Awakened Base,you need to decode a bunch of symbols in rocks, but some of the symbols look identical to each other and result in the player getting the wrong answers. Other missions are completely nonsensical, including one in the underground city Mayerem where youneed to kill yourself by drinking green poison in order to soul-swap with a farmer to get his sham (rhino/horse thing) to trust you. The game previously establishes that soul-swapping is done with reincarnation spells, but you're somehow supposed to know that for one specific mission, you reincarnate by dying and having the other character touch your lifeless body.
Level design is needlessly confusing. Halls in buildings are designed to confuse you and make you miss doors/openings, which are already difficult to see due to the poor graphics and colors that blend together. Controls make it frustrating to use stairs or get through parkour sections (of which there are many), such as in thepolice station water tank where you need to cross over a bridge to explore the ventilation shafts of the building. The bridge and ledges are so small that it's incredibly difficult to keep yourself from falling into the water every time you walk across.
Lastly, the story itself starts out pretty interesting but begins to fall apart halfway through the game. The plot sets up interesting conceptsa story about police corruption, reincarnation, demons possessing civilians to control gang factions and government operations, and an ancient god trying to take over the world by controlling a central computer that makes policy decisions for the government, but execution of story elements is incredibly poor. The plot is always explained through dialogue options with other characters. Instead of using flashback missions or visuals to explain crucial plot points, the game delivers major pieces of information with a page of dialogue spewed from a character's mouth. Although voice actors try and give characters life, the voice lines they're given are emotionless and dull. Characters are one dimensional and never change or grow throughout the story, and many of them seem to only exist for the sole purpose of explaining plot concepts.A few characters stick with you throughout the story, but so many of them appear once and are never referred to again.
I went into this game expecting some consistency with David Cage's other games and hoping for either multiple endings or at least differing dialogue options that alter relationships with characters. Unfortunately, the game is so linear that even when you receive multiple missions, at once you're forced to do them in a specific order.