Status: Released
Developer: Tangrin Entertainment
Publisher: Versus Evil
Genre: Action, Adventure, Indie, RPG
Release Date: 28th July 2015
Who doesn’t like vikings? Probably one of the most badass warriors that walked on the Earth. I personally like that viking, medieval, all that fantasy and magic world. Medieval is one of my favourite parts of history, though it is called the dark age of human history. My favourite part is Roman Empire and Romans. In Kyn you will experience the atmosphere of Viking mythology and medieval world with a little bit of fantasy and magic.
Story isn’t anything special, at least not in the beginning. You start as two warriors on your way home. While you fight your way through, you find out what happened to your once peaceful world. As I said, the story isn’t so interesting. This game doesn’t have character voiceover, so you are forced to read the dialogs, if you are interested to follow the whole story. Too bad there isn’t character voiceover, because the new modern gamers aren’t used on the old-school dialogs and because of that, they will probably skip the story.
Good thing that story isn’t the most important aspect of the game, gameplay is what makes Kyn a good game. Kyn is somewhere between or it’s a mix of standard RPGs and RPGs like Dragon Age or similar. This isn’t a standard open-world RPG. Combat is standard click attack style with two skills and one ability on your disposal. It’s a fast paced RPG and very chaotic when you must face a lot of enemies, but God bless developers for putting the “pause or slow-motion” mechanics in the game. Something like in Dragon Age, if you remember, but slightly different. I don’t how to call that game mechanics correctly, but when you press SPACE bar, the game pauses and then runs slowly (like a slow-motion). This gives you time to plan your next moves, which character will attack that enemy, who will attack the other ones, what skill or ability to use, but there is a catch, you are not able to stay forever in that slow-motion state. There is a blue bar above your skills that shows you how much more can you stay in slow-motion state and that certainly speed up the game, it’s not like in Dragon Age, you can pause the game and plan next moves as much as you want. To be clear, being able to pause the game as much as you want or like in Kyn, for some time, are both good things and you really can’t choose the wrong mechanics when you develop a game. This is just a good addition for more unexperienced and casual players. You are not forced to you use that mechanics, but then again you will have hard time without using it, probably dying a lot.
Now, what makes gameplay a little bit harder and different? This game doesn’t have classes and the level system, not in the way you guys are probably used to. You don’t create a character and choose the class. Weapons and skills determines character class. If you give your character a one-handed sword or two-handed axe, then he is melee (guardian, warrior, paladin or any other melee) class, but you can give him a bow or a staff and then he is a mage or rogue.
You build up your character by assigning points after each mission. If you don’t like how you assigned points, you can always reset skill points and start all over again. You get 5 points after each mission for each character and you can spend them in three category’s; mind, body and control. Each category has four skills and you can combine them. You can make a melee that can heal or to use some ranged skills (magic). I mean a lot of combination are available between those three category’s, but the full potential of the skills comes when you have more than 3-4 characters. You really need to think through, because you don’t want to have same or similar skills for each character and if you don’t prepare your warriors good enough, you will not maybe be able to finish the mission, because the game gets harder as you progress. Once, I made two mistakes before starting a new mission: I gave my characters wrong weapons and automatically I wasn’t able to use some crucial skills. Second mistake was that I assigned points wrong to my characters. I barely finished the mission. One more important thing is that there isn’t any healing or mana potions in the game. You always need to have at least one or two characters with healing skills and you should have that healing feed ability. As for mana, don’t worry, your characters will probably always have mana and regeneration of the health and mana is very quick. This is just one more thing that makes this game a little harder, but at the same time more fun to play.
So much things affects the gameplay and how you feel while playing. Preparation is the most important thing in this game, I am glad that this is no the standard open-world RPG game and I really can’t imagine Kyn as a open-world RPG (like The Witcher 3). Between the missions, you are in the main town of the Kyn world. In the town you will pick up and mostly finish quests. Beside quests, you can buy and sell items and you can craft your own weapons and armor. There isn’t a town map, you have the minimap. When you press the M key, the world map opens. I don’t know did they forgot to put the town map, but it’s really frustrating, because you need to remember the NPC location. “In the moment of writing this review, developers released the update #4, in which they’ve added the town map. Too bad town map wasn’t added before update”. Crafting is not available from the start. I think you are able to craft after third mission. Crafting is pretty simple, you just collect materials and you talk to right NPC for crafting(btw that same NPC is the father of one of your two characters from beginning of the game), then you just choose which weapon or armor you want him to craft. If you don’t have enough materials for specific weapon or armor to craft, you can always buy, but there are a lot of items and materials to loot in missions and I didn’t have any need to buy something from the market. If you are one of those people who doesn’t like to collect and craft, you can buy items. I don’t know is that expensive or not, but I think any option to get yourself new items is a good one.
There are puzzles in Kyn. In first 5-6 mission I only occurred two puzzles. They aren’t really hard and it shouldn’t be a problem for you. It’s good that developers didn’t decided to put harder puzzles immediately from beginning of the game, because some players would probably quit the game. The puzzles don’t need to be harder, but sometimes they can be very confusing and in the end you lose a lot of times on solving them. There isn’t an auto-movement option in the game and sometimes it can be really annoying, especially when you are trying to run away from enemy to regenerate your health or mana. In few occasions I needed to move all my characters from one side of map to the other and it took too much time. Auto-movement option would make my life easier in Kyn.
Controls are what I don’t like the most in this game . They are very clumsy if you play by default and since I am reviewing, I don’t want to change anything in my settings, I want to try and to play game as developer meant it to be played. With Q and W you use your two skills and with E you use feed ability. You change your characters with numbers 1-6. When you are playing the game for the first time, you will have hard time with controls, because I assume mostly of you are used on to use skills with numbers and maybe to use TAB key to change character. Few times I died, because I wasn’t used on controls still and when you are attacked by few enemy’s, it’s not good. You can easily miss the key, use the wrong skill or you simple mark the wrong character. Controls are clumsy, confusing sometimes and I recommend you to change the hotkeys as you want and how are you used to play RPGs.
Music in the game is nice, beautiful. I am little disappointed how game looks, from graphics, level design, design of characters to animations. It seems like game is stuck somewhere in the middle of the last decade. Even though the camera is isometric, you still need to make game beautiful and this is where Kyn fails. Not such beautiful game graphically speaking, but I don’t like the level design or to say map design too. Sometimes the map is either too small or too big, then we have the problem of repetitiveness in the design of the map. Buildings, random objects are repeating too many times, they don’t look very detail. Animations are sometimes funny , sometimes unrealistic. It seems to me they focused too much on the gameplay of the game and neglected the presentation of the game. If you read my previous reviews and previews I always said that to me graphics aren’t important. but still Kyn should look much better. The special effects aren’t anything special too and animations aren’t so good. To be honest I will not take this as a very bad thing, because gameplay saves the Kyn and you will probably enjoy the game no matter how game graphically looks.
Kyn is the game that looks so innocent, so simple in the beginning, but when you enter into the real world of the Kyn, you find out how much the game is good and fun. Very good RPG with few things different and some minor problems, but if there weren’t any problems at all I would give this game a much higher rating. I like that developer decided to take a little risk and to throw out the level and class system. Basically its up to you , you have freedom in this game. It’s very strategic RPG game and it doesn’t forgive mistakes. Certainly not a standard/normal RPG and I think everyone can find something in this game, that he will like.
GOOD THINGS:
- gameplay
- no level and class system
- pause or slow-mo mechanics
- missions
BAD THINGS:
- no character voiceover
- presentation of the game
- clumsy controls
