Kivi's Underworld
Review
Hack'en'slash, the oldfashioned way
by Rook
reviewed on PC
Days of Yore (cntd.)
Once a mission begins, the player will have a storyline objective to complete. Once this objective is achieved, the mission is officially completed. This does not mean, however, that the player must move on to the next board. The option is given to stay and continue playing in order to earn more points or finish any other unfinished business that may be at hand, such as the secondary, optional, objectives which will award a substantial point bonus.
At the end of a successful mission, points are totaled and the player will be awarded with a rate of Bronze, Silver or Gold. These awards determine how many character skill points you will earn from the adventure, gold earning the most points. These points are used to advance the skills from the generic skill tree of health, mana, offense and defense. The real benefit to this isn’t just the advancement of skills for Kivi, but this generic skill tree is common to all playable characters the player has in his selection. The points spent will affect all available characters. Therefore, just because a player may favor one specific character, the other characters will not become obsolete due to not being used.
As an added boon to those players who must find every little secret and must attain the highest possible rank on every board, the player can return to any previously completed mission with any playable character in an effort to secure the Gold ranking for those precious extra skill points.
Enough with the fanboy fluff though. By this point it may be apparent that this title contains some good old hack ‘em up nostalgia, which is never a bad thing, but lets move on to the guts of the title.
Sites, Sounds and Narration
The first thing that will become painfully apparent to the player is that the graphics will pop out at you and make you go wow. Unfortunately it won’t be “wow” in a good way. Though Kivi certainly isn’t the worst looking title out there, it’s not going to win any awards either. Now this is a double-edged sword: For those players who are accustomed to the cutting edge photorealism of the high end titles currently in the works or already on the shelves, Kivi isn’t going to do a whole lot to impress. The graphics are clean, functional and are more then enough to get the job done, but mind-blowing they are not. The good side of all of this is that those of us who no longer sit on the cutting edge of gaming rigs don’t need to worry if their computer can run it smoothly or not. A modest machine will very easily get the job done here.
The sounds and musical score sit along the same line as the graphics. Nothing over the top or awe-inspiring, but it is certainly more then enough to get the tone of the game set and keep the atmosphere where it needs to be to enhance the chaos on the screen. There is nothing more boring than cleaving skulls to the same sound effect over and over again with no background music. Thankfully, that isn’t the case here.
8.0
fun score
No Pros and Cons at this time
