Karnn Age

I’ve been wondering about this game every since I started really paying attention to the indie games on the 360. Once you get past the retarded “story” (the sun gets real irritated when someone steps in the sand apparently) it’s actually pretty good game, if a little shallow.

It’s a twin stick shooter, and literally all you do is go through each of the levels and kill everything that moves.

The game has a number of features that set it apart, mainly stemming from the replays it comes with showing playthroughs of each of the levels on the hard difficulty. But it also keeps replays of YOUR plays … which in my case is pretty embarrassing because I’m not all that great at the game. But either way it goes, it’s still a hell of a lot of fun.

It’s also almost laughably easy on the Easy difficulty, ramps up to just fun levels on Medium … but on hard it’s just no fun because it’s just a little TOO insane for me. But that’s just me. I’m sure other people will have their opinions.

Graphically, it’s really nothing special. The cut scenes aren’t drawn all that great and the “story” is retarded. In game however, other than the main character which you probably honestly won’t be paying that much attention to anyway, the game looks pretty good. It’s the same boring backdrop every time, but the good variety of enemies more than make up for that. And when they die they explode in this glorious cloud of blood and guts, unfortunately it doesn’t stay on the screen. And the three bosses in the game fill a significant portion of the screen and look great. Especially when they finally die.

The sound effects are pretty generic, but they do work and don’t take away from the fast pace of the game. The music, while it is pretty good, isn’t anywhere near as good as the developers say it is. The one I’m reviewing here is the full version of the game with all the music, and there’s a light version specifically out there at the cheaper price (which, right now, is only a 50 cent difference) that has a little less music to make it smaller. And the Windows version of that lite version is available for free on the web site located here … but I’ve tried it on all three of my Windows machines and have never gotten it to run. And one of them is a fairly powerful machine. You would expect some kind of heavy metal rock music or something with this given how violent it is … but instead you get 16 bit era sounding stuff. Which doesn’t sound that bad, but I think I’d rather have some heavy rock music to go with it.

The gameplay should be of no surprise to anyone at this point. You use the left analog stick to move around and the right analog stick to shoot in whatever direction you wanna shoot in. That’s pretty much it. But if it works, don’t mess with it. And it definitely works well in this game. There are various powerups you can get such as one that makes a temporary shield around you that sucks up enemy fire and causes damage to anything it touches. Health, a rocket launcher (I’m assuming it’s a rocket launcher anyway), an extra high powered rapid firing gun that will help to clear the screen in no time. And against 2 of the bosses you get some sort of plasma gun or something that doesn’t have very good range, and adds to the slight difficulty of the bosses. When I say slight, I mean, once you figure out their patterns, they’re just kind of a pushover. But still a hell of a lot of fun regardless of that.

6.5 (rounded down to 6)– If you like these kinds of games, definitely pick this up. It offers up one hell of a challenge and is a lot of fun. The reason for the low score is purely on the fact that it has no multiplayer of any kind. It’s purely single player. And a game like this screams for multiplayer.

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This is a cool game, like the other reviewer this does bring back memories of games on the cool systems such as the Amiga etc & also this has brought the difficulty some of them took with it, even on easy it can take a while, but with replays of your best performances and videos with the creator completing them, its a nice addition to such a game. The Video as well is certainly amusing and defiantly different. This is a must download for a trial at least and a must buy for me. Wicked Game.

My first experience of Karnn Age brought memories flooding back to my years as a pimply faced youth sitting in front of my Amiga 500+, with an additional 1MB of memory I might add, playing Smash TV (no doubt the inspiration here). How I used to while away the hours making mush out of the hordes of attacking enemies... Sorry, I digress...

While Karnn Age shares similarities to Smash TV, it is totally unique in itself. It is a single player top down 2d shooter in which your character must fight through nine different levels (up to the time of writing I haven't managed to experience all of them yet) and 3 boss fights. You are almost constantly attacked from all sides, so luckily can run and shoot in different directions using the left and right thumbsticks. Speaking of the controls, they are very simple and make this game one that you can just pickup and go with, which is always good. LS = Move & RS = Shoot Direction - you couldn't get much simpler.

One thing that you need to lookout for is stepping off the grassy area in the centre of the screen and onto the sand as spending too much time here angers the invincible Sun God and causes him to attack you and once that happens, things start to hurt! This fact is brought to your attention at the start of the game by what I found to be a somewhat humorous introduction scene.

Karnn Age provides plenty of powerups throughout the levels to help you on your way to victory; something I didn't experience much whilst playing! The various powerups include health packs and temporary weapon upgrades.

There are also four different difficulty levels on which to play (personally I found the easy one to be a bit of a challenge) and your best performance is saved to replay later should you wish to gain some street cred with your mates.

I really found the name Karnn Age to be very apt as it doesn't take you long to cause enough of it (Carnage)! So if you fancy some destruction and maiming with a whole load or gore thrown in, then this game is a must. It's definitely not one for a quiet family evening at home!

I would recommend checking out the Karnn Age trailer. It gives you a good look into what the gameplay is like and is certainly entertaining :)

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