Osmos: How To Destroy an Ecosystem

When a game advises me to ‘Become Huge’ I worry that I’ve inadvertently agreed to review a less-than-reputable site. Thankfully I’m actually playing Osmos, a food chain game set in the microscopic world.

Osmos is the recent release from Hemisphere Games and attempts to provide a retail-quality version of a food chain title, a genre booming with flash game variants such as Feeding Frenzy.  As the player, your goal is to become the largest life form in each level by enveloping smaller microbes while avoiding all larger creatures.

The simple eat-and-dodge strategy established in previous food chain titles is upheld by Osmos, and I find it to be a stumbling block as the overall experience is very one-note. Each level attempts to provide a clever spin on the genre by adding AI opponents or placing you in the gravity well of a monstrous organism, but it always boils down to becoming the biggest organism. The gameplay is still addictive and Osmos does provide some original ideas, but I simply expect more from a retail title.

The controls provide more than your average fare as varying the mass of your amoeba has a direct result on its mobility. To speed up or change direction, you eject a bit of your mass as a form of propulsion. It’s up to the player to strike a balance between high-flying acrobatics and sustaining a size large enough to devour other microbes. While this concept may sound simple in theory, I found it difficult to master in practice. Your amoeba is a bit sluggish at turning, so strategizing prior to an attack is a must. One wrong move can easily toss you into a hulking beast you can’t avoid, and any quick evasive maneuvers can sap your amoeba of nearly all its mass as you desperately attempt to change direction.

After experimenting with the game mechanics for a few levels, I found the controls challenging but rewarding as flawlessly executing a strategy after multiple attempts is highly gratifying. Once I understood my plan of attack, it felt as if I was performing some sort of primordial dance as I gracefully weaved through giants while hunting my prey. Each seamless movement was feasible thanks to Osmos’ superb physics engine, an excellent feature over other titles in the genre. The engine ran so well that I actually got the sneaking suspicion I was playing the result of some scientist’s graduate thesis.

Graphically, Osmos presents a beautiful interpretation the microscopic world. The detailed amoebas provide a stark contrast to the empty abyss within which they live and assisted me in keeping focus on my microbial choreography. Enemies also change in color to indicate when they are consumable by your amoeba, another nice enhancement over the majority of its flash game brethren. The music is little more than trailing melodies interwoven with a subtle hand and works well with the sparse backgrounds in maintaining my attention with the bustling amoebas. Osmos aesthetically provides a rich world with its simplicity and makes me feel as though I’m back in the primordial soup fighting for dominance in a quiet yet chaotic world.

However for all of my praise, Osmos has one significant flaw: it’s short. Really short. I managed to beat the entire game in a few hours, including my fair share of retries. The worst part about its length is that it’s not much longer than most flash games I’ve played from the same genre. Although Osmos offers more variety than your average flash title, each level is easily beatable in a few minutes once you get the strategy down. I’ll be the first to concede that I got downright lucky on some of the latter missions as I managed to beat the majority in my third or fourth try, and any efforts I’ve made towards beating those levels again has been met with constant retries and slight fits of anger. Still, providing a system where I can so quickly achieve victory loses part of what makes food chain games so addictive. It should take hours of close calls and triumphant attacks to be rewarded with that sense of completion, but Osmos hands it up every few minutes. It often feels more like a physics engine demo rather than a full-fledged game, leaving the scientist in me quite content but the gamer-side hungry for more.

Though Osmos provides an excellent example of the genre, the short gameplay and lack of variety left me unsatisfied as I expect more from a retail title. If you absolutely love food chain games, this is a must-have. At its core, Osmos is a title that provides all the same enjoyment I’d get from a flash game but for a fee, so for everyone else, consult the nearest flash game site for equally satisfying lessons in how to destroy an ecosystem.