KAKU: Ancient Seal
Review
A Prehistoric Adventure
by Samuel Corey
reviewed on PC
Well Trod Ground
Kaku: Ancient Seal won't win any awards for originality. You play as a feisty young hero with a highly marketable animal sidekick (here a flying pig with giant ears that is just begging to be made into a stuffed animal) on an adventure through a vast world in search of magic stones that will restore balance to the elements. This is the kind of premise you might get if you were trying to formulate the most generic plot for a children's action-adventure story. The only original thing about the premise is the setting, which ditches the traditional pseudo-medieval fantasy world in favor of a pseudo-prehistoric Neolithic world
Where Kaku succeeds is in having a large, bright, and extremely pretty world. The world is divided into a variety of different biomes that are all immediately distinct from one another. More impressive than that is the fact that different parts of each biome also feel distinct from one another, meaning that a carefully observant player will always be able to remember their path and find their way. The realistic landscapes clash slightly with the Pixar-style cartoony characters, but it never becomes distracting, and both the more cartoony aspects the the more realistic aspects look nice enough on their own.
Collecting and Crafting
The game does suffer a bit from just taking the usual pick-and-mix bag of gaming systems without troubling itself too much with whether these systems gel together effectively. So in addition to the core of open-world exploration, 3D combat, and platforming, there is also a primitive levelling system and crafting mechanics. The latter is the more obnoxious, given that it means the fun parts of the game have to be periodically broken up with the busy work of collecting materials and fashioning them into items through glorified Excel spreadsheets.
Don't get me wrong, under the right circumstances resource collection, crafting, and survival elements can make a game more immersive. Just take a look at something like Subnautic, where the crafting aids the theme of being stranded alone on an alien planet. However, when these are bolted onto a game as just another feature among many, they quickly become tedious. Here they are just another set of items to collect, and another box to check rather than a cool immersive part of the experience. Indeed, for many materials, it seemed like it scarcely mattered how many I collected, as I already had a near-inexhaustible supply after only a couple of hours of playing.
That said, Kaku's implementation of this system is far from the most annoying that I've seen. At least it just has the collectibles automatically fly to you rather than making you sit through a tedious harvesting animation or run around the area picking up each one. I know I'm damning with faint praise, but I am tired of every open-world game adding in a lame crafting system, and I know I can't be the only one.
Souls-Lite Lite
The most puzzling decision Kaku makes is to borrow elements from Dark Souls for its combat. Granted these are the lightest of Souls-Lite mechanics, but there is still a recharging stamina bar and dodge rolls are your primary way of avoiding damage. Weirdly only dodging or using special attacks depletes stamina, meaning you can swing around with your basic attack all day long and not have to worry about getting winded, but two consecutive rolls will leave you gasping for breath like a morbidly obese jogger.
Souls-like combat is a poor fit for Kaku, as it is typically rather slow-paced and deliberate. Indeed, the game removes features like parrying from the typical Souls formula that tends to speed up combat, meaning Kaku fights tend to be even more deliberate than the original Dark Souls. The enemies are similarly ponderous in their telegraphs and attack animations. Tellingly, I almost always got hit because I dodged enemies' attacks too soon rather than too late. This is all well and good in individual boss fights, but Kaku also uses this combat system for all the numerous copy-and-pasted enemies that populate the world. There are way too many of these encounters for the slow-paced combat to be fun, and instead, it makes every trek through the open world into a tedious slog. I found myself simply bypassing most of the enemies I encountered out of boredom more than anything else.
This is a game that is crying out for either a more sparsely populated map with more deliberate encounters al la Breath of the Wild, or a more fast-paced hack-and-slash combat system.
Danger When Wet
The most amusing issue I had with Kaku is that your little caveman cannot swim, meaning he will drown instantly in water that goes over his head. This by itself is all well and good, but the game still expects you to wade through the shallows from time to time on your adventure. Unfortunately, the dividing line between what water you can walk in and what water you will drown in is extremely fine and more than a little unfair. At one point I even drowned in water I was confident didn't even come up to Kaku's armpit. It gives the game a rough and rather unfinished appearance whenever anything like this happens, but I will have to admit that I found it quite funny the first couple of times I drowned in what amounted to the shallow end of the community pool.
As always, follow Hooked Gamers on Instagram for news updates, reviews, competitions and more.
7.0
fun score
Pros
Large beautiful world to explore, Pleasant cartoony characters, No annoying, repetitive animations for gathering resources
Cons
Combat is shallow and repetitive, Difficult to tell what shallow water you can walk in, and which will cause you to drown.
