LogFAQs > #986842747

35. One Must Fall: 2097
Created by Epic MegaGames
Release year: 1994
Platform: DOS
Guesstimated playtime: ~125 hrs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i0FNUDLdT4A

Epic Pinball wasn't the only DOS shareware title on the list, nor even the only one by Epic. In fact, there's one more still to come.

The original OMF started off as a bad Street Fighter clone. This falls in line with most of Epic's early projects, which were generally rip-offs of other series. Jazz Jackrabbit was just Sonic with guns. Kiloblaster was a Space Invaders clone. And OMF was similarly ill-inspired until someone said, "but what if...robots?"

One Must Fall 2097 then became a much more inspired mech battler with incredibly rocking menu music.

The premise of OMF2097 is simply that humanity watches people in giant robots engage in prize fights. As a new pilot, your goal is to work your way up the tournament ladder and win, before moving on to the next. As you progress and improve your skills, so too do your opponents. By the end, literally everyone has everything maxed out, so ultimately it come down to skill, but in the meanwhile you can gain an edge over your opponents if you can earn performance bonuses. For a PC DOS title, there was a decent amount of skill expression, especially given the ten different robots you could play as. The shareware version only had the first tournament unlocked and three robots, but you could loop back through it as many times as you wanted, which is exactly what I did, over and over. The default robot, Jaguar, was a perfectly fine option and I learned all the combos for fighting in Jaguar, but that didn't serve me well when my friend got his hands on the full retail version and we were battling in 2P head-to-head. Some of the robots don't look remotely humanoid, so they're a little weird to respond to.

One of the fun bits of OMF was that all your opponents on the ladder had some degree of personality -- a name, a portrait, and unique lines they would taunt you with before the battle. Additionally, there were a fair number of fun secrets. If you won a fight a particular way, you could be challenged by Jazz Jackrabbit, for instance. Because your opponents only gained new stats at the start of a new tournament, I learned to maximize my stat increases during the first run by hitting all the special bonus fights I could, including getting the finishing bonus for pulling off the equivalent of a fatality. So yeah, even when Epic was being inspired, they were still ripping off other games.

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Up next: A series that got worse as time went on.