Koya Rift Demo

It often happens that video games with brilliant ideas get away with poor implementation and plenty of other mistakes, because the core gameplay is too much fun to worry about the rest of the game. As such, people were very kind to Gothic, and it is still praised as one of the best role-playing games out there, thanks to its story, great sense of freedom, and sturdy gameplay mechanics. However, the combat system was atrocious and it required hours of getting used to, but it got a pass because the rest of the experience was so epic.

Koya Rift is an action-platformer that features a lot of shooting and all the procedurally-generated content one could want to stay busy for a long time. On the other hand, while the underlying concept is great and capable of many awesome things, the presentation is lackluster and it casts an annoying shadow on the good stuff as well.

To begin with, the game’s selling point is the procedural world that is automatically generated each time you begin a new game. Your purpose is to clear a system of caverns located underground, which are filled with huge, ghostly-shaped aliens that resemble dinosaurs, for some reason. In essence, everything from the layout of the caverns, to the difficulty level and the weapons themselves are randomly generated every time in order to account for your particular skill level. In practice, things are not that exciting and boredom sets in quite quickly.

It must be mentioned that the procedural algorithms used to generate content nowadays are not very powerful as of yet, which is why they cannot really work on a grand scale. A lot of details must be sacrificed to gain content, but that’s a logical and understood trade-off. However, people have managed to make this limitation a lot less visible in games like Minecraft and the like, but Koya Rift just can’t pull it off. In essence, even if the caverns change every time, they are just as dull-looking every time, because there is nothing special about a maze of tunnels and a lot of dirt.

Gameplay-wise, this translates into a repetitive experience, one which practically forces you to replay the same level over and over again. Mind you, everything looks cool as heck the first time around, in great part due to the fantastic visual effects and the overall graphic quality, but the atmosphere gets stale rather quickly. To make matters worse, it is also relatively difficult to make out what happens most of the time, due to the haze of flares and explosions that covers the screen whenever you open fire on something.

All things being equal, Koya Rift is by no means a bad game. Unfortunately, it is a boring one, regardless of how fast-paced and exciting the gameplay might feel in the beginning. Hence, unless you are prepared to deal with these issues, the game is not worth more than an hour of your time, which is quite the shame.