Topic: Karous -The Beast of Re:Eden- (3DS) Review

[Daan]

Blandness is a better description than the word Beast.

http://www.nintendoworldreport.com/review/40188/karous-the-beast-of-reeden-3ds-review

Klon is a Japanese developer that I don't have many good memories with. I tried their various Nintendo 3DS offerings over the years and not one of them really stood out. When I got the chance to look at their first western release, I was willing to give it the benefit of the doubt. What I found wasn't horrible, but it did leave me wanting more and that is Karous' biggest flaw.

Karous -The Beast of Re:Eden- is a vertical shoot'em up, in which you try to destroy enemies that come your way. Unlike most shooters where you keep going until you fail, the game's structure here are the 100 missions that you will need to complete. While that sounds nice on paper, the missions are quite basic in their setup. You will be tasked with destroying a certain amount of enemies, defeating a single type of foe, blasting them with a specific weapon or simply getting to the end of the stage.

Karous was a decent time-sink I guess, but at no point was I actually having any real fun. I was just going through the motions and trying to get as quickly as possible to the end. Some missions took me a few times, so there was certainly a challenge there, but the sense of difficulty is quite quickly shattered. After every mission, whether you fail or succeed, your arsenal of gadgets gets constantly levelled up. This makes you stronger at every turn and it stops the game from going to a standstill, but it creates severe balancing issues. Before I knew it, I could easily survive the onslaught and it removed the difficulty completely.

At the very least, Karous controls quite well and the various weapons have the right amount of weight to them. I could easily fly around with the Circle Pad or D-Pad and use the various buttons to perform attacks. The title looks alright. It didn't really blow me in any regard, but the developers gave it their best shot. The fact that there are frame rate issues does make Karous problematic, in particular if you take into account that there are no 3D effects. The music present in the title is quite great, though with a handful of tracks, it doesn't really last.

Karous -The Beast of Re:Eden- is quite a disappointing package. With missions that are as basic as they come, the shmup does extremely little to make it stand out. It was a decent enough timewaster, but not one in which I found very much to enjoy. The game doesn't do things horribly in its gameplay or presentation, but the venture is as plain as a game can get. What a massive shame.