ODIA

This is not a good game, but it is interesting, and considering the low price (and short time investment), worth buying and playing as a curiosity.
It's a bit more difficult than it should be because the AI pathfinding for your allies is terrible, and they'll just walk into walls instead of helping you advance.
I think "possessing" an ally after death would've been beneficial towards cutting the downtime of having to travel all the way back to the frontline after respawning.
Movement after spawning is pretty fast but after 10ish seconds, I'd start moving along at half the speed for some reason?
It's pretty buggy, I thought I got hit with a gamebreaking progression bug because certain items just didn't show up in the game world, but that should be fixable just by exiting and rebooting the game (or in my case, reinstalling it).
But the concept of being a small, weak soldier sent to die against technologically superior foes, with only your sheer overwhelming numbers as your advantage is an appealing inversion of the typical power fantasy video games provide. I hope that the idea gets another, better executed shot one day.

Hyper frictional experimental gun souls. Considered quitting after getting killed dozens of times in the first area. I'm so glad I didn't because it becomes really interesting as the map opens up. It's not without its issues but if you can deal with a lot of death and retries I'd say it's quite rewarding.

yeah it's jank, but should still be picked up with your spare change for the interesting-ish game loop concept and neato aesthethics

A slow, trudging, sometimes irritating experience, but definitely an interesting game. Odia appeared before me after looking into the developer of Anopek (A superior GBA style FPS game), and after a moment of hesitation I bought it not sure what to expect. This game has zero youtube presence, and I've never heard of it from anyone ever, and after installing it I was met with the worst beach sequence in any game ever. You drop out of a starfish, walk forward, realize the only buttons you have are move, dash, and shoot, and die. This repeats until you inevitably give up. Probably a year later I came back, and in two sittings managed to beat the entire thing.

Story: You are a soldier of ODIA, a facist nation(?) with unknown reasons to be doing this conquest. The Odia are powerful allegedly but in game your main resource is the amount of corpses you can sling. There is zero penalty for dying but your time. Your enemy is a nation of regular humans using hybrid Knight-WW1 equipment and some brutal accuracy. Every unit of theirs is elite.

Gameplay: This is the main draw of Odia and also somehow its biggest negative, some parts of this page and the developer page describe this like its a retro FPS game with lots of powerful weapons. This is entirely wrong, you are slow as dirt and your weapon is weak unless charged. You have no crosshair, a dash, and a shield in your left hand. This shield is bolted in place and has to be held facing the bullets to SOMETIMES block them. The whole game is basically a challenge of patience and accuracy with the weapon you have. There are some AI exploits to make the game easier but its best discovered on your own. Hiding behind corners is your best friend if you get past the beach.

What started off as an annoying game became what I can only describe as a self imposed challenge. Like Getting Over it but in FPS format. It's not-not worth playing but its not worth playing.

Numericals: 3/10 shooting, its at least got a level of strategy to it and you get good at aiming eventually. 4/10 Game, has some good ideas but probably needed to be refined or iterated on to be truly good. A slow, tedious if not short experience worth looking into for its environment and if you want a game with mechanics not seen anywhere else. Sadly can't recommend for the average person, if steam had a middle hand it would get that.

First of all I wanna say this is not an old school fps despite in the store page it reads: "... hardcore retro FPS inspired by early first-person shooter games." In fact the only real similarity it has is the look of a 90s shooter. That's it.
There is just a single weapon (which you can charge up) (and a shield), unlimited ammo, no quicksaves, basically open world.

Despite that the game is still quite bad imo. Let me tell you why:
-incredibly low walking speed, thank god you can dash every few seconds, without that it would be even worse
-no visible crosshair even though you really need it, so I used a programm to get one
-you die from like 3 bullets or one missile, while the regular enemies fire in full auto and can kill you in a blink of an eye
-your weapon does so little damage and has so little range
-the shield often feels useless: you can't use the shield in front of you, like you know you could in every RPG, instead it's just at your left arm which means you have to turn around your character to be protected from the front, which makes it very impractible and often it doesn't block bullets it should
-this all means you die over and over, tho luckily, if you die, you respawn at your latest spawnpoint (there are a few areas in the game, each has a spawnpoint which you have to reach to "unlock it") and the progress you made till this point is not lost, so basically you kill one or two enemies, die, then go back to that area, kill some more, die again, live, die, repeat.
I wouldn't mind this system that much if I wouldn't die that much and that the walking speed is super slow
-bugs, I found two game breaking bugs, both tho "fixed" by restarting the game and restarting at the latest spawnpoint:
first one which I only encountered once was that some part of the map I went through previously all went like invisible and when I went through it, I feel through the map; the second bug was way worse: basically you have to find three blood runes to get to the end of the game, but there were first simply not there for me. I also read that another person also had that problem and said restarting the game fixed it for him. So yeah, it also worked for me. And I got that bug twice, really annoying stuff, especially if you don't know where the blood runes are so supposed to be. I knew it bc I used a guide, so I immediatly knew and restarted the game. But if you don't know you will just walk aimlessly walk around the whole map and wondering where they are.

Is it all bad? No, of course not. What I liked:
-the overall setting that you are a solider in some sort of facism regime and invade some poor guys, so basically you play as the vilain
-also the mix of like a fantasy, medival and like ww1 world
-the astethics of the game, especially enemy design
-I also don't mind the overall structure of the game, which is like I said basically a little open world, where there are some locked gates and you have to find keys to open them which you get by killing a certain (random !?) enemy in each of the ereas of the map and then have to find the cathedral and the three blood runes to open it which is the last part of the game.

Only play it, if you don't mind a more experimental game (which isn't a bad thing at all), a combat system which doesn't work how it should, dying very often and super slow movement speed.

Really interesting game! Loved the feeling of being part of a large invasion force.
I did have a bug where the red orb thingies didn't appear so I needed to close the game and reopen it then continue from the save point but it did allow me to look around the whole island and find little interesting hidden things.
Loved the art style it made me wonder what could be coming up next.
The message behind the game was also very nice! :D

I love the crusty visuals. the movement is slightly clunky, but theres alot of cool design in this fictional world. So far it seems like a typical throwback to the fps genre of the late 1990's, but its sequel, Odia 2 looks much more promising at the moment. (4./5.)

I really wanted to like this one. I tried. It's got a lot going on for it, right from the very first moment it builds up a really cool level of mysteriousness that few other games have. But man is this game frustrating.

I get that the initial hurdle wanted to make you feel like you were in a meat grinder. But when you start to get further, the gap between checkpoints really feels too far. Even with a shield it feels like you're too fragile to make meaningful progress without repeatedly tossing yourself into the meat grinder, and it's made so tedious by the inconsistent enemy respawns and long walk times back to your body to collect your keys again.

If you could get the AI companions to follow you and use them as fodder, or even take them over when you died, that would make this infinitely more playable.

I have a lot of tolerance for difficult, even frustrating games, but this one feels like it just wanted to waste my time. I hate saying that because I love the atmosphere, the graphics, and the enemy concepts. The intro is just so cool and weirdly creepy, but I can't recommend it. At its current price I'd really only buy it to support the developer, because it's clear they have talent, and I'd love to see more from them.

fantastic atmosphere but probably a little too slow and suffers from progression issues. softlocks can occur quite easily unfortunately and its somewhat easy to get out of bounds.

I like the idea of the game with a Normandy beach-like siege where you play as the invading fodder soldiers and once you die you become the next to spawn, kinda like respawns in Battlefield (well the first one at least, haven't played any since back then.)
But there's some really frustrating areas between some checkpoints which are spaced quite far apart, and you walk really slow and can't make shortcuts in enough places.
The AI of your fellow canon fodder could also need a really big upgrade since they usually get stuck not too far from where they are dropped in so a lot of the way to the next checkpoint area you're on your own.

I love retro shooters and ODIA is one I can not in good faith recommend.

While I get the concept of being part of some mysterious undead assault force lumbering towards superior foes in an unending onslaught the game is just not fun to play.

Enemies might as well have laser beams vs your pink paint ball gun. No crosshair but aiming doesn't seem to have a lock on at all (like DOOM 1993 a game I'll probably use as a nice pallet cleanse after playing this) making any sort of ranged combat tedious. Charging your gun does more damage but reduces the accuracy so its better to just pap away with single shots. You die in about 2-3 hits. Though the game says you can block with your shield seems dodgy at best.

Speaking of Dodgy, the game does have a dodge which you better get used to spamming as your walking if you could call it that is zombie like at best. Doesn't work well with going backwards either if you even tap that backwards key and the dash key you do no where. Even if you're holding left or right to get back into a hallway to dodge bullets. The ambushes that I ran into were not fun to deal with as often they were a simple I walked forward time to punish me for walking forward with DEATH!

Game has ambushes that are clearly meant to murder you straight up and will send you back to your last checkpoint. The way the game handles death is that you respawn but you dropped your inventory items on the ground so you have to zombie shuffle your way back to your corpse and then probably die again from the ambush that killed you in the first place. The good news is the game only seems to have one inventory item that being keys. Keys will drop from enemies and then you pick them up and find the door they go to.... Which with the zombie like movement is not great.

Overall I see what the developer wanted to do. I see a dark semi fantasy world being invaded by a dark force that is bent on killing everything in their path with their dark arts and revived forces. I see a slow, plodding, inevitable that the darkness will win. I see the vision, the world design, and setting are there it's just not in its current form a fun concept to play.

Interesting game, it's graphics are definitely retro, it's 1st person and you have to shoot, but it's very far from the style of a typical retro (or boomer) shooter. Not a game for everyone but also not bad.

For the first time it seems unbearably hard, but when you get used for the gameplay you'll don't stop 'til you win.
I very much like the HUD, too bad that you can't use the shield

However, I think the political/worldview statements are very forced and doesn't fit in the game's overall atmosphere.

Folks might be turned off by the lack of crosshairs and slow movement speed out of combat, but for those willing to put up with these flaws, you might enjoy this brief, unique shooter.

It's not a shooter. If you're in for some run&gun action then please skip and move along.

Odia has been a short, unique and enjoyable experience for me. It's essentially a lo-fi walking simulator with elements of shooting. Many of the negative reviews are somewhat correct in the description of the Odia's core mechanics but assume that the very slow and deliberate combat, movement and instant death are an accident. Instead it's a design decision where the combat really resembles a game of chess. You and your enemies move very slowly and the shooting part requires you to quickly pick up skill of aiming without a crosshair (you know, like in real life?) and using your shield correctly. Most of the commentators indicating shooting/shield is janky/broken actually failed to take time to practice and develop those skills - necessary to progress - apparently jumping in hoping for a classic shooter. I've got a strong feeling the both difficult movement and tedious combat are specifically meant to discourage you. You really need to put the effort in to progress and this has been part of the experience for me. The game make the protagonist body uncomfortable and inefficient, cheap and expendable. Yet, with the slow movement comes the penalty of being reckless and dying, having to traverse the map from the last checkpoint.

Once you command your weapon and shield well you pretty much traverse the environment, a fantasy world/planet being invaded by a dark force. You're one of the infinite grunts storming the human stronghold wave after wave. You're expendable and so are the defenders. What matters is your mission. But is it?

All this makes you pay attention to your surrounding, scouting for enemies. Soldiers with automatic weaponry, snipers, mobile mortar units, all can kill you with just a couple of rounds. As you walk around you're naturally taking in the surroundings. Sounds of distant shelling and people dying set against birds and waves of the nearby shores. Wind and bushes and tree moving. As you're walking your new shell to where you died last you start to wonder as to where exactly are you, why are you storming this place, who are the people you're killing. Who you are yourself. You're passing fields where these people have been growing their food, beaches where they had been sunbathing, temples where they prayed in peace. There is a family hut at the cliffs, not empty and devastated. The peasant you just killed was probably the head of the family defending his means of leaving. Now the lifeless bodies are laying beneath your feet killed by friendly fire of thei soldiers' own mortars trying the defend the city. Why?

The environment is very simple, most objects except for characters are 2d sprites along with most of the walls and vegetation. The low-res filter you see on the screenshots can be disabled if that' not something you like. Once disabled however seams across the scenery are visible. Separately, there are some scripting bugs if you traverse the environment in ways the devs didn't foresee. I think the QA suffered greatly from low interest originally and too few people reporting bugs. It's very clear it's a low-budget effort, end credits mention a number of sources for free assets and non-commercial tools used for producing the game. For me it was completely adequate to the themes and atmosphere built and did not detract from the experience in any way.

All in all, an interesting and unique 1-2h short story about freedom, diversity and senselessness of war. I hope the devs will decide to open-source the game or some of it so volunteers can fix some of the texture mismatches in the environment (for those who disable the low-res filter) or the occasional scripting issue.

Well done and thank you.

It's rare that you get to play something so unlike anything else you've touched. Odia is going to be compared to Quake and Doom, but it ignores so many of the lessons for those games, and is better for it. You are slow. Weak. You can barely see on the default Low Res mode, never mind aim. Your dodge roll is powerful, but comes with an extended cool-down. This lets Odia explore attrition as a game-play mechanic, and it is such a fascinating experience. Know what you are getting into, and you'll have a great time.

Odia's striking aesthetic, intriguing concept, and fantastic atmosphere is unfortunately offset by being utterly miserable to play.

Odia is trying to capture the feeling of being an expendable grunt, sent to smash in waves against an entrenched foe, so you can expect to die a lot, but that is not what sucks the fun out of it.
Your gun is near useless, being difficult to aim (something compounded by having no mouse sensitivity settings), having no real feedback, and taking so many shots to kill an enemy you'd be better of using it as a club.
You have a shield, that apparently blocks bullets, but this seems so inconsistent and awkward to use that it wouldn't be much help even if the enemies didn't pepper you with fully automatic fire. There's no button to raise it, so you have to kind of look off into the sky to hold the shield in the way of the enemy attacks. This of course means you're not looking at them, so can't tell if you're blocking the bullets. You'll probably die to a stray shot anyway.
You're also quite slow, both in moving and turning, something that makes you even more of a target, and makes getting back to your latest corpse particularly tedious.
You can of course hide behind your AI allies, when they aren't getting stuck on something, and plink away at the enemies at range where they are hard to see and harder to hit. A particularly unsatisfying way to play, that perhaps might not have been if the gun wasn't so awful.

I wanted to like Odia, since there's some interesting things there, but it eroded any patience I had for it very quickly.

recommended
kind of hard to explain the gameplay but if u like what u see in the pictures just get it
could use proper 3D enviroments and more content
great experience for a chill evening tho

Odia is a game about purple demons descending from a spiky sky starfish to murder a bunch of World-War-One-ish steampunk knights...

OK, I'm going to recommend this game, but that comes with one big caveat, as I feel it needs to be pointed out that this game doesn't feel like the "early first-person shooter games" which Odia's store description evokes. Yes, it's got minimalistic, maybe even downright crude graphics – but old-school shooters used to be fast-paced, offered many different weapons for any given combat situation and typically had a more tongue-in-cheek tone.

Odia deliberately eschews all of that, instead opting for slow-paced strategic gameplay (some might say "ponderous trial-and-error") as you slow-walk trough a reasonably-sized open map to a central cathedral that's implied to be your goal. You're only given a slow-firing, imprecise gun, a short dash ability and a shield for passive protection. As you fight on, you will die a lot, since enemies tend to be slow but deadly once they have you in their sights. Killed enemies stay dead, but you and your AI companions continuously respawn at specific points on the map, until the city you're besieging is littered with corpses. Odia is also a short game, by the way – it will probably take you about 2 hours to finish.

So if you're NOT hoping for a fast-paced old-school shooter and you find the gameplay concept I've outlined above interesting, Odia might turn out to be one of the more memorable gaming experiences for you, as its strong themes combined with minimalistic storytelling and gameplay entice you to come up with your own interpretation of what exactly is going on here. The final message in the credits kinda gives away what the developers wanted to say, though ;)

This unique FPS is a wonderful blend of Doom and Dark Souls. The combat is challenging but very rewarding once you get a hang of it, it's so rewarding. Even though the world seems fairly linear at the start, you'll soon realize that there are several different paths to take and a lot to explore! I love the shield mechanic, it's intuitive and really makes the combat feel unique. Can't wait to get further in the game, 10/10 would recommend!

The game concept is amazing. i really really REALLY like for what is going for. I have a LOT of things to say about this game.
If you are wandering what you can expect in this, don't go in seeking Doom or Duke Nukem. It's almost-sorta a Doom-Souls game. It's very slow, very methodic, and very rewarding. It's not a perfect -game- but it's a perfect -foundation- for a bigger experience, that i hope the developers are gonna keep pursuing, because they have hit a good atmosphere, gameplay, and overall general feeling.
You are the entire army of Odia, and your job is to invade and conquer. It's very clear that you are the bad guy here, or at the very least a demonic force of some kind.
The story is non-existent but it leaves all at your imagination, with very good style and leave you wanting to know more of the world where Odia is an actual army.

First the positive:
it's simple while complex and incredibly effective. you have ONE weapon and ONE shield. For many this may seem as a negative but in reality it's is biggest strength. The Bone-rifle is a charged based weapon, with no screen crosshair, witch it means that you have no precise idea where you shot will land at first glance. As the game progress you become in tune with the weapon and the ability to use it more efficiently came from the understanding as when to shoot, where to shoot, and how hard to shoot, as opposed as a more classic leveling up system.
Then there is the shield. As the game starts you immediately notice that a couple of shots well placed can and will kill you. If you are like me you began to wander how the shield will help you as there is no button for raising or using the shield.
The shield is always raised, and very similarly tho the Bone-rifle, you can used more and more efficiently with knowledge. Turns out it can block almost every enemy shot, but only on the left side of the screen-ish. This will force you to use the camera actively to parry shot in a very peculiar way.
But enough of that, part of the game is overcome and utilize the tools you are given to progress. The combat is half of this game and they have nailed it. It has a very solid second to second gameplay loop.
Lastly the map is quite complex and offer enough variety, offering multiple way to reach your objective. It has a very solid layout and begs to be explored.

Now the negative:
The game is less than an hour long if you are good at it.
i'm putting this here because generally speaking seems as people really care about game length. If this turn you off than i can understand it, especially, and this is the second big thing, for the price.
At the time as i write this, the game costs 10.79 euro. Don't get me wrong here, i think the game it's very well worth it for what is asking.
BUT, in an era where hundred of games hit steam every day, i think it's smart for the developers cut the price in half, for spreading even more the game, or even set a price-symbol of a couple of bucks, if not free. Generally people cares about money-for-hour mentality, and even if i dislike this method of thinking, i also agree that this game it's precluding itself for the asking price. Especially in an industry where this kind of little experience is very easily found in free games.
i'm saying this only because i see THAT much potential in this game and i want many people as possible to play this.
Then, the death system.
It has a fantastic idea initially. You are an army, not a single soldier, so if you die, you are gonna respawn as another soldier.
But the thing is, your army is endless, and given this, unstoppable. Dying become very quickly just an annoyance, as no kind of punishment is given to the player in any meaningful way. The way to overcome this would have been to adopt a Star wars Battlefront campaign method, where your army is NOT endless. or at least you can be defeated, where understand tactics and learn to overcome intelligently obstacle become an actual necessity to lose as less soldiers as possible. And this will encourage to seek hidden passages or alternative routs to objectives, exploring the map even more.
Finally, the enemies variety is a bit lacking, a few more will incredibly help, even if the ones that are here are very good, and overcoming even a couple of soldier alone feels as a big accomplishment.


Conclusion:
As said i think it's an almost perfect proof of concept. I WANT to see this game build upon in a bigger experience. More levels, more situation, more enemy that require alternative method of defeat. More weapons too, few of them, all in the style of the one give to you here, as a one weapon that have multiple convoluted usages. maybe if you wanna create a sort of more strong sense of progression for the character you can think as a megaman X progression system. Hid power ups that encourage exploration and maybe use them as a risk-reward factor (more damage dealt, more frequent dodge but no shield).
It begs to be continued and iterate upon. It leaves you with wanting more of the game and this is the highest praise i can possibly give. I have a lot more to say but for now, if you are not bothered by the price, i strongly suggest to buy this game and help the developers as you can.

The more I play this the more I realize how much there is to do. I love the 'Thief' style aesthetic, and the organic way you learn about the world of ODIA, who you are, what you're going up against, and even how to play the game. The pacing makes this the most unique FPS I've played in years, and I highly recommend it for anyone who has an inquisitive itch to scratch. Note: I've now played this on two machines and the playthroughs have been different so far. I don't know if that's intentional or just because I approached it differently.