Astro Boy: Omega Factor review

Astro Boy is a very old Japanese cartoon series, which arrived on Gamestyle's shores in very limited supply. The retro style is as plainly obvious as the tight vinyl underpants Astro himself flaunts thereby showing the franchise's age. Despite this fashion blunder the concept of robots living amongst a human society, questioning the soul and life itself is a very contemporary idea, and it is this that Astro Boy: Omega Factor is built around.Taking on the role of Astro - a rebuilt robot boy searching for his soul - you must battle your way through hoards of attacking enemies in a beat 'em up style not dissimilar to Capcom's Viewtiful Joe. Indeed the same extreme dextrous capabilities are needed to stay alive as you punch, kick and jump through the side-scrolling levels, and sometimes up into horizontal shoot 'em up style stages.But Astro Boy doesn't possess Joe's fancy special-effect abilities and because of this fighting tends to be a little on the repetitive side. In retrospect it would have been nice if Astro could 'duck' to avoid the swarm of incoming projectile bullets that virtually every enemy is armed with. However the best he can do is to activate a 'dodge' move, which sees him speed across the screen on rocket boots. This (plus jumping) are his only means of evasion; so in order to keep alive you need to ruthlessly attack and refuse to stop doing so.When the action heats up, everything slows down. But don't be fooled; this is not a bullet time effect! The Viewtiful Joe similarities are unintentional as Astro Boy displays some horrific slowdown. At times it becomes virtually unplayable, and practically crawls to a standstill. We should expect more from games today; technical incompetence is inexcusable. The enemies Astro will fight are deceptively few. Little robots, flying insects and men with guns (amongst others) are reused not only in different colours, but different sizes too. It's a remarkably efficient method of using sprite scaling to depict what appears to be huge numbers of different enemy types. Some of them almost fill the entire screen; when you get a few of these attack you all at once, the slowdown can really kick in.Continuing the trend of Viewtiful Joe similarities, Astro Boy is exceptionally challenging. It has a very 'old-school' difficulty feel to it. As you'd expect, Easy Mode is normal, Normal Mode is hard, and Hard Mode is "stop hurting me, I only have two thumbs!" There is no disadvantage to playing Astro Boy in Easy mode other than it kind of makes much of the skill needed totally redundant. As the special moves Astro can perform have almost unlimited uses; you can quite literally blast everything to pieces without trying too hard.One area where this becomes even more apparent are the boss encounters. Exceptionally well-made, the boss fights will have you trying over and over again to beat them, and they all have a very specific method, which will certainly make your hands ache.Astro Boy is not a long game, as in truth; the seven main 'levels' are over very quickly. But there is a very clever method of storytelling that takes place afterwards. The mystery of the game's plot is not unravelled on the first play through, which opens up the stage select and lets you try any level again. On repeated plays through the game, events will happen differently, characters will say different things and you will meet new characters, which helps to upgrade your abilities and max out your powers. These upgradeable abilities are earned whenever a new character is met in the game, and they fill up a cell in a grid, representing the different aspects of the human 'soul'. Discovering his computerised soul (called the Omega Factor) is Astro's overall objective, and each time he gets closer, his health, powers or sensing abilities will be increased.The excellent graphics are very detailed and the parallax scrolling backgrounds show some very impressive cityscapes. This allows the game to feature an assortment of environment types that take you from cities, up into the skies, through the Antarctic, and into an ancient civilisation. Music, too, is catchy and memorable, and the sound quality on the whole is very high. Along with the well-defined characters, the presentation is quite excellent, with auto-saving and skippable cut-scenes/menus to allow for quick retries (and you will need them).Overall, Astro Boy has its fair share of good and bad points. The laziness of the enemies, repetitive combat and ridiculous slowdown are all against it; but the clever storytelling, great boss fights, high-quality presentation and rock-hard challenge ensure this is a step above a lazy, licensed game. If you're looking for a challenging beat 'em up to tide you over for a while, then give Astro Boy a look. It's no Viewtiful Joe by any stretch of the imagination, but it's well worth a go.