The Last Oricru | Windows PC Review
The Last Oricru, developed by GoldKnights and published by Prime Matter, is a story-driven RPG adventure set in a sci-fi meets medieval world that is on the brink of war. The game features single player, local co-op and online co-op. It is currently available on Windows PC, PlayStation, and Xbox, and for the purpose of my review I was playing on Windows PC.
The Last Oricru launches you into the centre of an ongoing war that has been going on for a long time between two races in a place called Wardenia. On one side you have the Noboru who are a hard faced, staunch group of brutes, and on the other you have the seemingly oppressed Ratkins, who are rats (surprise!) and talk in gibberish. You’ll take on the role of Silver, a warrior with a clear penchant for fashionable haircuts. He randomly wakes up on an alien planet that blends science fiction and fantasy together. Lost and confused, Silver must interact with the Noboru and the Ratkins to try and understand and comprehend the crazy world of which he is now a pivotal, world changing part. Every dialogue choice, every quest you complete can and will impact the story. The beginning of the game prefaces it with a statement basically saying that there are no right or wrong decisions morally, so justify things in whatever way you want, and choose the adventure that YOU want. Every single bit of dialogue, even the seemingly meaningless conversations, will have an effect on the world.
First and foremost, I’d like to say that I really love the premise of this game and felt very invested in the story early on. The dialogue itself is great, I really liked the voice acting and loved the little humorous and witty remarks throughout. As I progressed, I really appreciated the fact that every piece of narrative was tied in together, and it was clear as day when an earlier choice you made is about to cause you a multitude of problems with a certain faction.
Unfortunately, the incredible narrative and storyline is let down by a few factors that are a real shame. Firstly, I find the game is poorly optimised. I played the Windows PC version, and my gaming PC far surpasses the minimum requirements specified for the game to run, however, it totally overloaded my encoder and caused my whole PC to crash in quite spectacular fashion. The long and short of it is, the game feels really poorly optimised. This was the most significant crash for me, and it was very frustrating because I know my PC is more than capable of running the game, however this crash was very serious as it caused some audio issues that the only fix for is to restart my whole system. I’m sure anyone can imagine that was a massive pain because I was streaming at the time. There was another crash that was frustrating as the game just froze on the “You Died” screen and there was no other answer than to Alt-F4 out of the game. Game crashes aside, The Last Oricru has so much potential to look stunning. There are some areas of the game where the visuals are spectacular, but then you enter into a conversation with someone, and you see facial animations that are reminiscent of PlayStation 2 releases from my childhood. Also, throughout cutscenes I also found the camera clipping through whoever was talking, and I would get very unattractive angles through people's chest cavities and such, which really destroyed the immersion for me numerous times.
Next, let's talk about combat… It’s not great. In and of itself, the combat has the potential to feel satisfying, but unfortunately it feels quite clunky. The camera also feels way too floaty - I then tried to lock on to enemies to try and counter this a little, but it then causes the camera to move in a less than helpful way. Unfortunately, the combat just felt a little bit too restrictive and non-responsive. Alongside this, there were often enemies aiming in totally the wrong direction in a way that looks like it was absolutely not intended. You can tell that the combat was designed in a way that was to mimic a Souls-Like, but with the aforementioned flaws, it just felt like it was lacking too much to fall into that category.
The idea behind the co-op is definitely another point, in theory, that is excellent but has its own flaws and drawbacks. Your second player is essentially a ghost of you, and they get a shared inventory with you and share level up points with you as well. You're not limited in that respect though because the second player can choose to spend those points, however, they get to make their own build which is nice. The second player can drop in and out at will. However, this isn’t without flaws, unfortunately. Upon my friend joining my game we ran off to go adventuring and very quickly had to restart the game because we got sandwiched between two NPC’s, each other AND a barricade and the only way out of it was to restart the game and go through the rigmarole of re-summoning my friend. Whilst it wasn’t exactly difficult, it’s just frustrating to have to do these things. There isn’t a massive amount of hand holding within the game, for good and for bad, but we did spend a large amount of time very confused about our objective, and just meandering around aimlessly for a while. If it weren’t for me co-oping it with my friend, I’d have become much more frustrated than I did.
Overall, it’s a real shame I encountered the issues I did during The Last Oricru because the concept is really excellent and has so much potential. However, I do think the game needs some significant updates to help it run better and eliminate some of these issues. My biggest comparison for the game is The Forgotten City meets Elder Scrolls. I feel very conflicted on a final score to offer because I can see the worth in this game and the concept behind it. With a little bit more refinement it could be absolutely exceptional and become an easy favourite of mine, however, unfortunately in its current state, it’s really become a major point of conflict for me. I want to rate it highly for being a wonderful concept, but I just feel like there are so many small yet significant flaws that it really tarnished my experience. I’ll be avidly awaiting a patch though and would be excited to pick it back up again.
Lj’s Rating: 2 out of 5.
For more information on The Last Oricru please use the following links...
GoldKnights - Developer | Facebook | Twitter | Website
Prime Matter - Publisher | YouTube | Twitter | Website
Many thanks to Plaion for the Review Key.
The Last Oricru | Windows PC | PlayStation | Xbox
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