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HomeReviewsKaku: Ancient Seal Review – A Hidden ARPG Gem

Kaku: Ancient Seal Review – A Hidden ARPG Gem

Hailing from China, indie developer Bingobell is a small company with only one other credit to its name, a tiny VR title from 2017. But in 2020, they released a demo for their new project; Kaku: Ancient Seal, a far grander videogame than what came before. A few demos, some big changes and an Early Access period later, Kaku: Ancient Seal is a welcome surprise.

Kaku: Ancient Seal invokes a lot of other games in its visual style and gameplay, from Tak and the power of JuJu and Kena: Bridge of Spirits all the way to a dash of Pokemon in the form of Piggy, a cutesy flying companion who likes to exclaim his own name like a question, a statement and a swear word. In some ways the mix of fighting, platforming and puzzle solving reminds me of classic PS2 platformers, but with a modern lick of paint and a much larger scale.

You play as Kaku himself, a young lad trying to chase down a strange flying pig-thing. Crashing into an old man, he finds himself accidentally involved in an ancient prophecy. Y’know, your everyday Chosen One kind of thing. To save the world, Kaku and Piggy will have to team up to explore the four realms in the hopes of finding the Elemental Temples which house important artefacts. It’s all a little Zelda, isn’t it? In fact, maybe The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild would be the best comparison point, albeit without the Nintendo budget.

The story of Kaku and the people he meets on his adventure is one of the weaker aspects of the game, although it isn’t terrible. Kaku himself is likeable enough and Piggy is just pure cuteness in a pair of overgrown ears, but everyone else is rendered down to one personality trait and nothing of substance. The lack of voice acting plays a large part in how forgettable everyone is too. Perhaps because English isn’t their native language, Bingobell’s writing style gives everyone the same voice, making them all a forgettable blur of cartoony faces.

There are four worlds Kaku will explore, from a lush jungle to a frozen wasteland, and each of those are split into smaller zones traversed by magical portals. They are gorgeous areas to explore, at times looking far better looking than the game’s presumably modest budget would suggest. It’s actually a slightly odd mish-mash of graphical quality, because while the environments and vistas are terrific, the animations are janky. For every cool enemy design, there’s a texture that looks out of place.

These graphical inconsistencies are signs of the game’s small team and small budget. Another sign is how there isn’t a whole lot to do in the spaces given to us, either. Enemies are strewn across the landscape like candy from a hastily opened bag of Skittles, there are some treasure chests to find and a handful of basic side-quests, none of which really fill the space. It gives the impression of big levels designed for the sake of having big levels rather than because the game actually needs them.

Another area in which the game is held back by its independent nature is the repetitive mission design. Whenever you head to one of the four continents (you can jump freely between them, which I love) you’ll meet a new pal, get introduced to the local bad guy or bad gal and then head off on a series of quests, usually involving talking to someone, jogging across the landscape, beating some stuff up and then doing it all again.

The good news is that the gameplay involved in doing all of that is usually rather fun, provided you can accept its limitations. Kaku is quite handy with his club, as well as a catapult for dealing with the game’s slim selection of enemy types from afar. There’s a special attack that damages an enemy’s Poise meter too, which once drained leaves them stunned. By combining the two attack types there are special moves Kaku can unleash, many of which are dictated by his stamina bar.

I did find the difficulty balancing to be a tad off. A lot of enemies are very easy to take down through button mashing, but mixed amongst them are random enemies that seem to absorb damage like a goddamn sponge. These foes look just like their comrades but will have a much higher damage tolerance, meaning they aren’t more challenging to fight, just more annoying.

The Poise mechanic is a nifty idea, but it doesn’t have as much impact on the combat as I’d like. It seemed more effective early on, but as I levelled up the damage my regular attacks did far outstripped the usefulness of Poise.

Overall, the combat is fine and can be quite fun in small doses. Over the course of the game though, its simplicity became more and more obvious and repetitive. There’s only a few enemies types and they only use a few moves, so after a couple of hours you’ve seen everything the game is going to throw at you outside of its boss fights, which are also quite basic. After a while, I began to ignore the pockets of enemies on the map because stopping to fight them all was tedious. By bypassing fights, I could keep the combat feeling fresher.

You get some light puzzle-solving and platforming to help mix up the gameplay. This is classic stuff: a double jump and a mid-air dash, along with the occasional fetching of an elemental stone. There’s a weird burst of acceleration when you press the jump button which caught me off-guard the first few times and Kaku isn’t as nimble as I’d like in the air, but once I got the hang of I had a great time.

The elemental temples are where the game really hones in on the jumping and puzzling. It’s like a collection of the classics, from rotating cylinders and walls of spikes to rising water, deadly mazes and levers. These sections are occasionally frustrating thanks to some clumsy design but are otherwise a lot of fun. Again, it has a kind of old-school vibe that I can get with.

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