Oddworld: Munch's Oddysee is a platformer that brings all that crazy Oddworld goodness to the XBox in glorious 3D. The game opens with beautiful cut-scenes that give you the background of Oddworld's newest inhabitant, a Gabbit named Munch. It would seem that his race is being harvested by the evil Glukkons for food, lungs and profit. Munch realizes he may be the only Gabbit left, until he gets captured by mad scientists at Vykkers Labs where he is fitted with sonar so he can be used to track down other tasty creatures, giving the mad scientists more time to invent more products to sell.

Meanwhile, our hero Abe is enlisted by "The Almighty Raisin" to go and free Munch so that Abe can continue on his quest to free his fellow Mudokons and finally live in peace and quiet. Armed with his wit and his gas, he meets up with Munch and the two of them combine forces to take down another evil corporation and free the innocent from the clutches of capitalism. Not to mention rescuing the last can of "Gabbitar", a Gabbit caviar, before it becomes lunch at some Glukkon happy hour. This is important since this can of eggs can help to restore the Gabbit population to abundant numbers.

This game is a typical 3D platformer, and you have to get Abe and Munch to jump, run, and puzzle their way across the beautifully rendered game levels. Both Abe and Munch are unique in both appearance and ability, and most situations require you to alternate between the two characters in order to pick the right one for the job. For example, Munch's new sonar allows him to "jack in" to gun wielding robots and bomb dropping cranes, while Abe can call upon his spirituality and possess the enemy. While Munch is not much of a track star, he can swim exceptionally well, while Abe can high jump with the best of them. You spend a good portion of the game just figuring out which order to use which character, and on some levels spend an annoying amount of time switching back and forth until you can flip the right switch or jump through the right hoop.

This is a puzzle game, and every level is stacked full of well designed, but fairly linear puzzle obstacles. Many of these require spending a lot of time running back and forth opening up different doors or paths to get the two characters, or the Mudokons they are escorting, through the level. One example of this is a level where Abe has to get Munch through a series of timed pressure switch doors, while taking out the enemy Sloggs. While it's fairly obvious what you need to do, it's a long haul to get through the level. While you feel some sense of accomplishment, you also feel sort of tired, probably out of empathy for poor Abe having to bounce up the cliff just "one more time."

Death plays a lot in this game, as in some cases it's the only way to get far enough ahead to figure out what the next obstacle is. You might be the best gamer in the world, but you'll quickly find that sometimes you just have to throw yourself into the minefield to figure out how to get to the other side. Luckily, this isn't an arcade, and you aren't limited to just three lives. Munch and Abe can resurrect each other by finding specially placed spawn sites where the other character can be hatched from an egg. You can even respawn your Mudokon friends after throwing them into hopeless odds Slogg battles. What are friends for, anyway?

The game is beautiful and contains some of the most creative, and disgusting, characters you've ever seen. The cinematic cut-scenes that drive the story could be packaged up into a Saturday Morning format and shown by themselves. (I'm actually surprised we haven't seen Oddworld Inhabitants do a big screen movie, frankly. They are that good.) The in-game levels are not quite as detailed, but hold to the Oddworld style, with fantastic landscapes, gritty Glukkon labs, and humble Mudokon huts. Of course, this IS a platformer, so everything is placed just so to make it take Abe and Munch as long as possible to get through.

While you might be tempted to play this game with your kids, due to the comic nature, you might want to listen to the Teen rating on this one. Most of the game is fairly harmless, but it's still no cartoon. One of the funniest and most gruesome scenes involves dropping enemies into the zone for a high speed "recycling fan". You can imagine what happens next as hapless Sloggs are sucked into the blades. While I personally find this highly amusing, you might want to make sure your fan grills around the house are smaller than your smallest Guinea pigs before turning it over to your kids. The game also continues the fine Oddworld tradition of "gas humor" which frankly had my 5 year-old literally rolling on the floor. And let's face it folks, farts are just funny, even after the bazillionth time of "Press the X button again daddy!!"

The controls are fairly typical for a 3D game platformer, with the ability to rotate the camera around to get a good look at your surroundings, but never quite easily enough. You can tap the white button to reset the view to Abe or Munch's posterior, but I wanted to use the right analog to swoop the camera around. Instead, that's a sort of directional attack button that seems wasted in this game. If you DO get into any combat, and don't have any cannon fodder Fuzzies (very humorous tribble-like creatures with really BIG teeth) or Mudokon "pals" to throw at the foe, you'll generally just run around in circles clicking the button as fast as possible. Usually, if you got into paw-to-paw combat, you probably did something wrong, so retrace your steps again.

What I like best about Oddworld is the not-so-subtle social undertones it represents with creative comedy. Oddworld teaches us that unbridled capitalism, at the detriment of the environment, native species, and natural resources, can turn our world into a really nasty place. It also teaches us that the worker, with some help from his friends and wise cracking mystics, can rise up and overthrow the shackles of slavery. Combining a sense of familial loss as Munch's family are "fished out" with the spirituality of the Mudokon Oracle, The Almighty Raisin, Oddworld uses comic humor to remind us that we're all a part of this great big world, and, darn it, we all need to just chill out and all get along. It does this by inventing a host of unique and interesting characters, like nothing you've ever seen before, yet are all still strangely familiar. We can all learn something from this game.

At the very least, you learn that farts are funny to five year olds.