It seems as though classic style RPGs are making quite the comeback in this day and age: Games like Pillars of Eternity and Serpent In The Staglands come to mind. We’ve got another new entry into the book of Dice-Rolling CRPGs, and that’s KYN. The game comes out in a few weeks, but Versus Evil was nice enough to send us a pre-release preview copy of the game so we could give you a taste of what’s to come.
KYN takes place in a mythological Viking-esque world, filled with creatures and magic. The story is kind of difficult to follow, as there’s little explanation for what’s going on. From what I can gather, it follows two warriors who enter a magical cave to acquire powers. The game starts as they leave the cave, which they’ve been in for months, apparently. Upon leaving the cave, they find that their land has been plagued by evil. A normally peaceful race known as the Aeshir has become corrupt, attacking villages everywhere, and its their quest to find out why. It’s a simple enough setup, but unfortunately one that isn’t fleshed out very well. The entire time I was playing KYN I felt like I was missing a huge chunk of the story, and it just didn’t sit well with me.
This isn’t helped at all by the fact that our main characters, Alrik and Bram aren’t very interesting. I find it incredibly strange that the developers decided to stick the player with two specific characters, rather than allowing the them to create their own, as is the case in most CRPGs. Not only this, but it seems like these two are the only permanent characters you get. In my time with the game, extra party members only lasted for a short while.
KYN‘s gameplay is a mix of real time hack and slash, and tactical strategy. You can order your characters to attack enemies, and you can use skills, while also being able to pause the game. A very odd design choice I noticed was that you can only pause for a certain period of time. I couldn’t understand the point in this design, as it doesn’t allow the player to carefully think and plan in a sticky situation because they’ve got a timer ticking down–And in my experience, all that does is increase stress levels. Another strange design is that you can only have three skills on your hotbar at once, which doesn’t feel like very many. The third slot is for a special kind of skill that can only be “created” by finding special stones; These stones can have different effects on the specific skill, and that’s a very cool idea.
One of the main points of KYN is that it’s unforgiving, and that’s definitely true. Unfortunately, I feel as though KYN is unforgiving in an unfair way, rather than a challenging way. The problem is that you’re given only two characters, and almost from the get go, the game throws groups of 8+ enemies at you. Even though these enemies are fairly weak initially, they always ganged up on me and surrounded me, keeping me from retreating to heal or use a skill. And even in the first level, the enemies quickly get incredibly difficult to fight, as they have tons of health and do a ton of damage. It got to the point where I couldn’t even beat level one on the normal difficulty. I’m usually fairly good at these types of games, but in this case it was just ridiculous. I had to restart on the easiest difficulty just to proceed, and even then it was a pain trying to stay alive.
I think this is due in part to KYN‘s biggest flaw: The AI–It’s bad. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Artificial Intelligence act so…Unintelligent. If this were fixed, I have a feeling the game would be about ten times better, because this really does a number on the gameplay. It seems to be mostly the friendly AI that has no idea what it’s doing. The biggest issue seems to be pathfinding. Pathfinding is basically how characters are programmed to move to a specific spot in a game when commanded to. Usually they’ll try to find the most optimal path to said location, and will usually walk around obstacles and such.
Not in KYN. Half of the time my characters would end up walking in a totally different direction, or get stuck on a tree or a rock. Rather than the AI correcting this, they’ll just sit there and wait for you to tell them to do something else. This can also happen in combat. I had one of my heroes equipped with a bow, and told him to attack an enemy. Rather than move passed the rock he was in front of, he just started firing his arrows in the direction of the enemy while still standing behind the rock–Resulting in the arrows going nowhere. This happens way too frequently, and it makes combat incredibly frustrating and difficult.
Another annoyance is that characters will rarely attack enemies themselves unless they’re already being attacked. Many times I would have a character getting his butt kicked by an enemy, while my other character stood 2 feet away doing absolutely nothing. I shouldn’t have to keep ordering my characters to attack, they should just attack any enemy within range of them. Sometimes they do, and sometimes they don’t–It’s totally inconsistent. On top of that, sometimes if you have your characters perform an action or attack an enemy, when they’re finished, they’ll just randomly run to some other random location without being told. I have no idea why, but it makes combat even more stressful. This all adds up to make one big mess, and it really turned me off from KYN. It’s a shame, too, because the game is pretty fun when it’s not causing so much frustration.
KYN has a very expansive crafting system. Very rarely will you find new weapons and armor from enemies or chests. Usually you’ll end up collecting tons of crafting items, and it’s your job to craft your new items. This isn’t so bad of an idea, as it gives you something to work for, but at the same time, it’s entirely based on luck. If you don’t find one last item you need to craft a new weapon, you’re in for a bad time. There doesn’t seem to be any way to replay levels, so if you can hardly fight the enemies in the next level, you can’t really do anything about it. This would be made easier if crafting was streamlined a bit into more organized tiers, and if enemies dropped specific crafting items, rather than random ones.
The graphics in KYN are very nice. They’re got a sort of cartoony look to them, and while most NPCs look generic and boring, the enemies are pretty cool. The game runs perfectly on my PC, and if you’ve read my other reviews, you know I don’t have the best PC in the world. The levels all look very interesting, and are varied enough to avoid repetition. The soundtrack is also fantastic. The music, while not completely memorable, is still very well composed and atmospheric.
After playing the first few levels, I’d say KYN is a fun and interesting game, but it’s hard to recommend due to the AI problems holding it back. I still enjoyed my time with the game, but that enjoyment was continually accompanied by frustration. I sincerely hope these big issues are fixed by it’s June 28th release date, because if they are, it’ll be a great game. I can see where KYN is trying to go, it’s just having a hard time getting there–Much like the characters have a hard time getting anywhere. I just feel like I was completely missing something that was causing the game to be more difficult than it should have been. I just hope I have a better time when the game is fully released.
A copy of KYN was provided by Versus Evil for the purpose of this preview.