Oni

Oni is a third-person beat'em-up by Bungie West, a division of Bungie that only released this single game.  It's sad because they definitely showed promise.  Released in 2003, Oni took the fighting genre, which was largely the realm of console gaming, and brought it to the PC.  Oni is, at its core, a solid, well designed fighting game, but a little bit of misplaced hype wound up hurting the product in the end.

Set in a dystopian future, you take on the role of Konoko, one of the few female leads of PC gaming and a kind of police operative hunting down a criminal and terrorist organization referred to simply as The Syndicate.  As the story progresses, you learn that the government you serve has been keeping dark secrets about your past and go rogue to uncover the truth about your history.  Character designs were heavily influenced by the movie Ghost in the Shell, and Konoko was intentionally designed to resemble Motoko from the film.

Of course, all of that back story is just window dressing that sets the stage for action, and Oni has plenty.  As a fighting game, the third-person camera and controls are quite good, making it easy to weave around multiple opponents.  You unlock additional, street-fighter style moves as the game progresses, but personally I always found these a little difficult to execute during combat and would generally stick with conventional tactics.  The game also utilizes multiple ranged weapons, pistols, machine guns, plasma rifles and such.  These are extremely handy and add an additional level of fun.  Most of the time, you'll be picking these weapons off of your fallen foes.  Ammunition is very scarce, so you'll want to make your shots count.

The game environments tend to be open, which lends itself well to the style of gameplay, but also sometimes makes the levels feel a bit sparse.  Nevertheless, battles across rooftops and airport terminals are entertaining.  Levels tend to be large and full of areas to explore.  Bungie West hired an architect to help design the buildings used in the game.

The game can be quite challenging as you deal with stronger, faster enemies, often armed and in large numbers.  The game does not hold your hand at all, and defeat means starting the stage over from the beginning, but when you complete one, you just feel like such a bad mother that the satisfaction is hard to beat.  If you've seen Iron Man 2, think of the scene where Black Widow reveals her true nature and begins taking out security guards in epic fashion: that's you in this game, and it's awesome.

On its release Oni received good to mediocre reviews, partly influenced by the lack of multiplayer.  A multiplayer feature was hyper during pre-releases demos, but in development it was discovered that lag was a significant issue and common networking technology was not sufficient to develop a fighting game that could compensate for it, so ultimately the feature was dropped, disappointing potential fans.