Omnibus

Written by Sean Colleli on 3/31/2016 for PC  

Every once in a great while I preview a game that is unequivocally not for me. The challenge with this kind of game is to stay as objective as possible—to judge the game on its own merits. Developer Buddy Cops’ OmniBus is just such a game. Even if this game drives me up a wall, literally and figuratively, is it any good? And will anything change before it is released that might make me love it?

While OmniBus is indie by definition, don’t expect a twee walking simulator that pushes its obnoxiously one-dimensional political opinions in your face at every turn. OmniBus is the sendy-uppest send-up that ever sent itself up. The game’s very title is a pun—OmniBus is not a pursed-lip compilation of literature or art, it’s a game about a bus that can ostensibly do anything except stop or slow down. It’s a goofball, absurdist parody about a bus that is a space and time travelling superhero.

This is what originally drew me to OmniBus; watch this trailer and tell me you don’t want to play that right now.

The game bills itself as this lost vaporware classic originally slated as an Atari Jaguar launch title, tragically delayed over and over until it finally arrived on Steam courtesy of Devolver Digital. Buddy Cops clearly are poking fun at the idea that indie games have to be these pretentious meandering slogs that must be about something (I’m looking at you, Gone Home and Firewatch) when really the whole point all along is to have fun.

They also snidely recognize that a lot of indie games push the whole retro, low-fi aesthetic not because it’s arty, but because it looks arty and they’re too poor/lazy to hire a decent art and animation team and thus resort to low-poly models and hastily animated sprite art. These old style graphical methods are art forms unto themselves, and doing them poorly with the pretense of being “retro” (whatever that means) is both unambitious and a bit insulting. Presenting OmniBus as this lost PS1-era relic shows that Buddy Cops understands this, and I love that.

That humor doesn’t end at the trailer either. The game is literally about a bus that cannot stop or even slow down on its own, a bus that helps all manner of people with their problems as it travels the world and later on, outer space. These tasks include breaking open ancient tombs to help a treasure seeker, shuttling tourists around a city, falling from the sky and sticking the landing to obtain a bus skydiving permit, and leaping between slim platforms while avoiding black holes. Mission requests are presented in brief text boxes, and the character portraits are grainy photos that are clearly the developers’ family, friends and neighbors.

Sounds like a laugh riot, no? Well it would be, but here’s where the game starts getting on my nerves. It’s all about potential versus execution. Despite its simple premise, OmniBus does a surprisingly varied number of things with its gameplay. The levels span a huge number of colorful and goofy environments, and your “missions” range from obstacle courses, stunt jumps and demolition. That last one is the most common—smashing lots of stuff seems to be the primary gameplay focus. But in general OmniBus has the making of a classic arcade-style experience, something that would be right at home on the Dreamcast.

The problem is that it’s just too bloody hard. I’m on the wrong side of 30 now and I admit I don’t relish a punishing gaming challenge as much as I used to, but I at least expect difficult games to have an honest learning curve. OmniBus starts annoyingly difficult and ramps up, precipitously, from there. The first level, which tasks you with smashing a cemetery, is also packed with unfairly placed pinball bumpers that launch you across the map, off the edge and into the abyss. I must have played that relatively basic opening level more than 30 times before I beat it. The subsequent levels—and worlds, five of them!—just get more cheap. OmniBus tries to laugh it off with mocking death screens that say things like “no more bus” and “mum would be proud” but after dying for the umpteenth time it just rings hollow.

It doesn’t help that the game’s very physics engine seems to be intentionally broken. It’s like it is designed to flip and tip your bus at the slightest jolt, and landing on anything but your wheels fails the level. Pair this with the game’s obscure mission objectives and janky controls, and you’ll be replaying levels a dozen times before you even figure out what to do and how to do it. I understand that this style of game is in vogue right now. Hotline Miami and Superhot have similar difficulty cliffs, and both of them get on my nerves. But neither of them feel broken, or intentionally unfair. I play games to relax and challenge myself, not to get so frustrated that I’m in a more frazzled mood than when I started playing.

Some games, like Broforce and Not a Hero, use wit to soften the harshness of their stout difficulty. No matter how often those games made me swear at my monitor in frustration, I kept coming back for one more level because I loved their personality so much. OmniBus doesn’t do this. Its humor and style evaporate almost immediately under the constant impact of its punitive difficulty. It’s a brilliant idea and a laugh-out-loud sense of humor crushed by needless worship of arcade challenge just for the sake of it, like Robin Williams doing some genius standup while simultaneously punching you in the face. It’s impossible to enjoy the game’s winking humor or colorful, low-poly art style when you just keep dying. It’s like how the recent Star Wars Battlefront looks beautiful and recreates the Star Wars universe perfectly, and you could get immersed if not for the spawn campers killing and teabagging you every ten seconds.

OmniBus at least has a free play mode, where you can drive your choice of bus around a large city map and destroy the scenery. This lets you get used to the finicky physics and mechanics and also go for a high score; smashing everything in your path and ramping off of objects and bumpers for GTA-style tricks gives you a multiplier curiously tallied in dollars. Free play is a fun little diversion and works well as a tech demo, but it’s not fleshed out enough yet to be worth a lot of time, or comprehensive enough to really prepare you for the challenge of the story mode.

I’m still not sure when OmniBus will be released. On Steam it’s slated for a vague spring 2016 launch window. I also don’t know what it will cost, so I’m at a loss to render judgement on whether or not it will be worth your hard-earned cash. But regardless of when it comes out, this game needs some serious difficulty balancing if it hopes to appeal to anyone but the most masochistic players. With tweaking or variable difficulty modes OmniBus could be an enormously good time, especially at a party and after a few pints, but for now OmniBus isn’t for me. I hate to say that because I really, really wanted to love OmniBus, but my desire to preserve my sanity—and to spend my time on more enjoyable games—won out.

Buddy Cops, if you’re reading this please, please include some difficulty level options for this tired old gamer. I’m way past the days of pumping endless quarters into Tempest cabinets at my local Showbiz Pizza Place, but at the same time I love the style and wit of OmniBus. I also want to enjoy the whole game, so if you’d be so kind, balance this sucker out before you put the final version up for sale.