Let's say that Mom and Dad Kratos had other things to do that night. Maybe the monthly Ilota Hunt had been anticipated, or there was the dress rehearsal of "Come Home On The Shield, Darling". The gods of Ancient Greece would have continued to lead the good life, amid squabbles, passionate feuds and armed with mythological creatures under their command. In short, the usual. Until, one unfortunate day, a member of Zeus's extended family interrupts a seminar of Philosophers (that's right, with a capital letter) by walking on it. The lone survivor swears revenge, sharpens his vocal cords, and incites the crowd to revolt. The age of the gods is over: that of men has only just begun… as long as you manage to get to the end.
Apart from anecdotes about violent Spartans, this is the incipit of Okhlos, the rogue-like revolt simulator with Hellenic hues and the first work of Coffee Powered Machine. What at first glance appears to be a goliardic and humorous title on the abused background of Greece at its glories, turns out to be anything but trivial. Although, sarcasm or non-sarcasm, the Greeks in robes cannot be seen.
The Pawing Crowd
The appellation of "revolt simulator" could not find a more suitable game than Okhlos. As a player we will control both extremes of any successful revolt: on the one hand there is the Philosopher, the instigator of discontent against the god-tyrants who orders the crowd to Attack, Defend, Gather or Disperse; on the other, the crowd itself, this mass of sprites and individuals who will sacrifice themselves at our command, throwing themselves again and again against a well-fed collection of beasts and mythological creatures. The composition of the crowd is also crucial in many ways.
Okhlos provides six classes of units with different attributes to balance: Philosophers, Citizens, Warriors, Defenders, Slaves, and Heroes. First of all, it will always be necessary to have at least one Philosopher at the head of the crowd: the only way to see the Game Over screen, in fact, will be the death of the philosopher aatore without the crowd being able to provide a valid replacement. If after conquering the first areas of the game you come to think of this as an impossible possibility, if only for the large number of unrecruited units that we will leave behind, the advanced stages of the game will make you think again. Philosophers are also key to supporting crowd morale: the greater the number of Philosophers, the easier it will be to heat up our crowd and keep it at levels that can raze every single building on the map. You wait too long, or you lose too many units due to devastating attacks, and our revolutionaries will be discouraged, going so far as to abandon the crowd to return to anonymity. Citizens, on the other hand, play the role of basic unit, without infamy and without praise, all in all useful only as meat for slaughter or for exchanges with merchants, which we will talk about shortly. The Warriors, a declared tribute to Miller and Varley's 300, are then the base units with the highest attack value, while the Defenders increase the overall defense value of the crowd. Finally, the Slaves are the weakest human units, but with the unique ability to carry the various objects that we can collect in the numerous areas of each stage in preparation for Boss and mini-Boss. "Human" units, you ask? Yes why Okhlos does not deny the revolutionary spirit to cattle either: this will be incorporated into the crowd without going to affect the maximum limit of recruitable units, but their usefulness will remain limited to filling the screen even more and exchanging with the markets in the interludes.
And speaking of exchanges, we come to the last class of units, and by far the most effective: the Heroes. These can be obtained in different ways, including as a reward for defeating mini-Bosses or hidden in the map, but mainly we will have to exchange predetermined numbers of basic units in our crowd - 3, 5 or 10, depending on the Hero - at the merchants in the intermediate areas. The higher the cost, the greater the crowd stat bonuses or Leader bonuses to nearby units (such as heal for each enemy killed or area boosts for the crowd). The Heroes will also not affect the crowd count, except in some special cases in which the presence of a Hero will increase the maximum number of units.
Sic Semper Tyrannis
Okhlos he doesn't like to make things simple for the player. No, Coffee Powered Machine developers have decided to entrust some rather important features of the game to luck: in the interlude areas we will in fact be able to find unit swappers or caches of objects in place of the much coveted Heroes merchants, and even if they are the latter to welcome us, it is not certain that our crowd has inside it enough units to be able to acquire one of the 100 heroes that the game offers. Nor will it be possible to backtrack or independently replace the units of our crowd one by one to obtain the numbers necessary for the exchange, unless we meet one of the swingers mentioned above, but who often will not offer the class we need anyway.
The acquisition of a well-balanced crowd and a large handful of Heroes is therefore the aim of each stage, but it is often too much entrusted to chance., especially for a game that intentionally introduced rogue-like dynamics. Consequently, it is not at all rare to arrive at the end of one of the 8 stages with a crowd perhaps full of the effective, but unprepared to face the Bosses, the tyrannical gods of Olympus. Sometimes, Heroes are missing; others, there aren't enough slaves to carry those upgrades and heals that almost any Boss will have you consuming to survive. Whether ready or not, each Boss will unleash an arsenal of themed abilities with their own area of influence: Artemis, goddess of the Hunt, will trap the ground and bombard our crowd with volley of arrows, while Hera, wife-sister of Zeus, he will temporarily turn our units into better animals than Circe. All of them, however, will prefer to summon hordes of enemies to thin the ranks and give time to use the most devastating abilities. Watch out for morale!
How to make Metal Slug play Homer
Visually, Okhlos it comes with a very pixelated 2D graphics, not unpleasant or annoying even after long sessions but whose lack of details or finishing is felt above all in the common chaos of each battle where dozens of models overlap. To overcome this problem and allow the player to promptly alternate between Attack and Defense, the rioters will be smaller than all, or almost all, enemies.. The latter vary from stage to stage, from the classic soldiers to jumping centaurs to harpies and tritons, and all in all the number of models reused after a simple change of textures is quite limited. Homer's dialogues, our sarcastic guide, are faithfully translated into Spanish, but they lack dubbing even in the original language and are still the only lines of dialogue in the whole game: the advance of the revolution will be accompanied only by grunts, the roar of battle and specific soundtracks for the stage in which we find ourselves, catchy but that you will forget in a short time even after intense sessions.
The overall feeling, however, remains that of an old arcade, one of those in which anyone as a child has invested a small fortune in tokens or coins of 50 cents. The looming threat of Game Over and the controls, especially when played with the joypad, only reinforce this feeling. The crowd and the Philosopher are in fact controlled separately, one on each lever: most of the enemies will try to reach the Philosopher to decapitate the rebellion, and the crowd will not be able to move beyond a certain distance from their leader. This, overall, translates into commands that are simple to learn, but much more difficult to master; and at the most advanced stages, or against certain Bosses (for example the dearest Aphrodite) the mastery of the controls will be the only barrier between victory and yet another Game Over. With mouse and keyboard, the controls become perhaps more difficult, despite the greater precision of the movements: in fact, the crowd will follow the cursor while the Philosopher will be commanded via the WASD, but the cursor will often be submerged by the crowd and enemies. It seems a paradox, but our advice is to play it with the joypad.
So is Okhlos a worthy addition to the toy library? For only € 12,99, of course yes. This small title can give you many hours of gameplay in a stubborn attempt to reach Olympus by overcoming obstacles of increasing difficulty, defeating all the hidden mini-Bosses and unlocking the secret Kryptos modes. After a few runs, the initial stages - let's say the first half hour - could rightly appear repetitive: Okhlos doesn't have a perfect countermeasure to this, but in addition to procedurally generated maps, the in-game Trophy system will reward your feats with new Philosophers and Heroes to choose from when starting another game. This therefore goes to counterbalance, in part, a perhaps excessive dependence on purely random mechanics. In case the curiosity arises in you to know more about the Heroes, the gods or even the mobs, the initial menu presents a small encyclopedia kept by the sarcastic Homer, which will update it as you advance towards Olympus!
