Genesis

The Ooze

The Ooze is not the kind of game you'll run around your neighborhood screaming about; it's not nearly gross enough to stoke controversy, and it's not pretty, groundbreaking, or violent enough to warrant rioting in the streets. It's just a quietly original, unassuming little game that you'll find yourself playing more often than you may have originally intended.

The Ooze may not be the best game around, but at least it's something different and that should be applauded.

The stages also tend to be very maze-like and unimaginative, with generic switches used to open new areas. The first stage is a toxic dump that's crawling with snail-like creatures, burrowing claws, and scientists armed with flamethrowers. Pressing the A button initiates a punch, but it's hard to control, especially when your ooze becomes large. Pressing B lets you "spit" a distance, but that causes you to lose mass. The ooze effects are nice, but it gets tiresome to sit through time-consuming screens which slowly form the words "1 life left". A quirky soundtrack plays throughout the game, and nice audio effects clearly convey splattering fluids and bloodcurdling screams. There's no password feature, so you'll always need to restart from the beginning. There are some good ideas here, but the Ooze never quite gels into a fun game.

Oozing with mediocrity, this game never delivers anything worthwhile or worth buying. The Ooze should crawl back into the sewer.

What the heck is this? Okay, I like the concept. It's new, but the game just doesn't do it for me. The graphics and sounds are first generation and the story doesn't work. The enemies are pixelated with no features. The blob effect is done fairly well, but it is very choppy and controlling your mass gets very tough. Things move slowly, too. Most importantly, The Ooze is not even fun to play. It seems more like work than a game. If this is the last frontier of 16-Bit, I bid thee farewell.