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Karous - The Beast of Re:Eden [3DS]

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    Karous - The Beast of Re:Eden [3DS]

    So, first impressions...not good. Not good at all.

    Do you remember Karous? No? It was on the Dreamcast (probably the last official DC game ever released), and it could be described as a Radirgy in black and white. Radirgy never left a big impression on me (though its sequels were better) and Karous to me was a soulless ripoff to Radirgy.
    Both games had several points in common: your ship/robot was armed with the standard shot, a sword, a frontal shield when not shooting, and a bullet-eating bomb that doubled a multiplier (I must confess that I don't remember the details).
    The same concepts are found in Karous The Beast of Re:Eden, plus the possibility to equip your ship/robot with different weapons and items. In Karous, the score is replaced by experience points, and I think that weapons accumulate experience individually, based on killed enemies; experience points are used to unlock new weapons, I guess. IIRC Karous had a similar system, but limited to a single life(credit?).

    Instead of the usual series of stages, Karous 3DS is a collection of bite-sized missions with various tasks, like "destroy enemies with your sword", "destroy enemies with your standard weapon", or the highly enticing "equip this weapon and wait until fully charged". Each mission has a time limit, and all missions in a group must be completed before moving onto the next.
    Missions do increase in complexity, but so far they have been all below 5 minutes, and this left a very bad aftertaste in my mouth. So far the most complex missions featured two enemy types, each with its own pattern, and everything felt like a secondary mode of almost any other shooter out there.

    Your robot/ship has an energy bar, and the bombing is unlimited, but it needs to be recharged between uses. Both these bars are on the lower screen, along a face of your character, experience points, mission description, time left, progression of your task, dialogue from an other character, equipped item, and an eject button to quit the mission. Talk about crowded (sorry).

    The game slows down a lot. A normal enemy wave, a larger enemy, and you firing, will make the framerate drop dramatically, and the most intensive effect I see are the triangles falling from hit enemies. Not that the rest screams quality: your ship/robot is white, enemies are dull grey, their projectiles white, and bonuses light grey. It's kinda depressing, really.

    #2
    I can't believe there's no 3D.

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      #3
      I heard this was very much based around small segments of game rather than aping the full thing, something like Ketsui DS? My expectations are set super low but it should be arriving soon.

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        #4
        Soulless rip off of Radirgy is a good way to describe Karous.

        I never much cared for it, this will sell on the shmup hysteria alone sadly.

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          #5
          Originally posted by fuse View Post
          I heard this was very much based around small segments of game rather than aping the full thing, something like Ketsui DS? My expectations are set super low but it should be arriving soon.
          That is the structure. Short missions, too shorts for their own good. It's hard to grasp how mechanics work (if you don't understand Japanese) and I've noticed some critical flaws, like being unable to pause during missions, the lack of a simple "retry?" after failing a mission without going back to the mission selection screen, or the inability to go back to the mission selection screen after choosing one. I hope that noone that was at Milestone actually worked on this.

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            #6
            Thanks for posting impressions, I did enjoy the original but the lack of any sort of info about this game up until now had me worried. Cash saved then!

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              #7
              Some more impressions.

              I think the biggest problem is to understand what you're supposed to do. Sometimes there's a hint in the mission description, like the name of a particular item, but most of the times it's up to your guess; of course, this is a problem for someone unable to understand Japanese.
              Then comes the game, which is uninteresting. Debrief screens mention a boss counter, but so far the only distinction I can make between enemies is how many shoots they take before dying, as there isn't much else to say about them.
              Missions are short, way too short, and it's very hard to understand the underlying mechanics; again, this is a problem created by the language barrier, but longer missions could have helped in making someone understand how various things work, especially when some missions border on the completely useless, like equipping an item, or destroy x enemies with a weapon...and some are repeated!
              More interesting missions, like getting the highest possible bonus or keeping the multiplier at a certain level are marred by the horrible framerate.
              Everything is polygonal, graphics are sharp despite their complete lack of variety, but more than two enemy waves on screen and everything kicks into slow motion; unlike many shooters where slowdowns can help in navigating bullet patterns, slowdowns here are constant, to the point it's infuriating. One more problem is due to the game's perspective, as Karous 3DS is not a full top-down shooter, but the viewpoint is slightly slanted, making portions of the screen unaccessible; everything in this game is huge, compared to the available area and the 3DS' screen, and these things combined makes you wonder if people programming this game even saw a shoot'em'up before, let alone play it.

              Experience (=score) permanently unloks weapons, which lets you power up your ship wheter or not you successfully complete a mission. The original Karous DC might not have been the greatest shooter ever, but from what I recall, the more you stayed alive, the higher the experience, better the weapon; here this risk/reward is completely lost, and some missions require a certain weapon to be completed (like the one where you have to use your shield to destroy 50 enemies), which means grinding missions with a certain weapon just to advance.

              I haven't talked about the music because the techno/disco/whatever tracks used are not my cup of tea, and all of them do not seem to be anything than five seconds loops, where the main instrument is a broken engine or the first two things that the composer found in the dishwasher.
              I mean, maybe the composer is someone famous and respected in his field (the game comes with a soundtrack), but I think even him realised the game was crap by just looking at it and gave his least for the soundtrack. And again, I don't like techno, maybe those who enjoy this cra...genre...might say otherwise.

              Add the various oversights I mentioned in previous posts (no pause? Really?), and Karous 3DS is a game to avoid. And my plans of getting Radirgy 3DS (coming out in Feb 2014) are seriously being reconsidered.

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                #8
                So, yeah, I'm still playing this. Why? Well, the lack of games is not a reason, but probably I wanted to be sure that the game is bad.
                I've reached the third degree (degree = set of 30 or so missions), and all three degrees have missions like "destroy X enemies with the sword", and exactly how many missions of this kind does the game need? In the game's defense some missions are interesting, but every single one of them feels like a secondary mode for a game that's not there.
                Even advanced missions aren't particularly long, and since you start from scratch at every mission, there's little incentive in going beyond the passing mark.
                Mission monotony aside, I think the biggest problem is how slow the game moves.
                Having the game slow down just because you are shooting at the first enemy wave on screen is simply unacceptable, and every mission on the third degree is more akin to a PowerPoint presentation that a shoot'em'up, with everything moving at half or even a third of the intended speed. Sometimes I think that these slowdowns are a godsend, otherwise you won't be able to differentiate between the grey background, the grey enemies, the grey projectiles, the grey explosions, and your grey ship; I don't recall the original Karous making the best use of black and white shading (that goes to Ikaruga), but Beast of Re:Eden has ludicrously flat graphics. And I think the slowdowns even affect the music, but I couldn't care less about Karous 3DS' musical score. Sound effects are non-existent, not even a chime when your bomb is recharged or when collecting bonuses.
                Now I'm sitting there, thinking of any redeeming quality this title might have, but nothing comes to mind: sometimes I think "well, the interface is not bad", but then I remember that you can't get back to mission selection from the armament screen without starting the mission, failing it (eject button on the touch screen or getting destroyed), go through the timeline screen, the score screen, and the save menu. Seriously, did they even put some effort in this game? The game's logo on the 3DS menu doesn't even spin; I'll leave the lack of stereoscopic 3D alone, because that could actually make the framerate worse than it already is.

                I fear for Radirgy (yes, I'm going to get it).

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