xbox live indie game reviews

Karnn Age has one of the most bizarre openings of any game I've ever played, which could be disastrous in an environment where game purchases are so tightly linked to impressions of the trial version. Two girls are strolling on the beach, which pisses of the sun. He vaporizes them (okay, there were skeletons left) and then you're thrust straight into a top-down, dual-stick shooter. Most of the levels are split into a central grassy area and then a sandy exterior. Wandering too long on the outer sand will piss off the sun, at which point he'll come beat you down. As a game mechanic, it works great--the sand keeps you confined in a smaller space while you're free to shoot at incoming baddies. Enemies are capable of tossing you out onto the sand, which generates intense feelings of "oh shit get back on the grass" and takes me back to one of my favorite movies ever: Tremors (okay, sure they graboids could come up under grass, but we're just talking about different threatening terrains here).

Assuming your WTF-scale has a high enough scale to let you get past the opening, Karnn Age is a hell of a lot of fun. I've been down on the dual-stick shooters I've reviewed for the soon-to-be-called-Indie-Games channel, and I was starting to think I was just down on the genre as a whole. Karnn Age has renewed my faith in the low-budget shootemup, and I think it has a lot to do with the style. Most importantly, it's not set in space. Your guy is actually standing on the ground. That may seem like a minor detail, but as a result I didn't once feel like I was playing Geometry Wars. It's also not a rail shooter. All of the action is confined to one box.  Instead of enemies popping on screen and then floating past if you don't kill them, their sole purpose for being their is to kick your ass. They're not going anywhere until they kill you or you kill them, which gives you sort of an epic "last stand" gameplay as opposed to something more like on assault on some mysterious blah-blah-blah. It works.

The enemies themselves look great, and remind me a lot of the monsters in Weapon of Choice. Instead of a whole shit-ton of enemies with different flight patterns and guns, there's actually a pretty solid variety of enemy types. Some are small and horde-like, some plant themselves and act as turrets. While there are some massive bosses, there are also regular enemies that dwarf the normal creeps and take a bit more strategy to take out. Every so often one of them will drop a powerup like bonus health or a powered up gun (which only lasts for a short burst), but for the most part you'll use your starting gun to mow down hordes of enemies.

I did have some issues with Karnn Age. The health bar is enormous, which actually makes it kind of hard to gauge how much health you have left. Instead of glancing over to the corner of the screen to check it out, you kind of have to really take your eyes off the horde of enemies and figure out how full the bar is. The powerups could use a little work--the improved guns are great, but I'd invariably get them when there were nothing but boring entry-level creeps on screen. It'd be great if you could save your badass guns until you actually had something worth using them for on your screen. Other than boss fights (where there's an enemy health bar), there's absolutely no indication of how much longer you have to survive. The seemingly unending horde of enemies can grow a little tedious without that knowledge, and it would've been as simple as putting a progress bar somewhere else on screen.

There are actually two versions of Karnn Age on the marketplace: the regular version and a "Lite" version. When I first saw the "Lite" version, I was all set to rail into the developer for being an idiot. For iPhone games, "Lite" has come to mean "free demo designed to make you buy the whole thing." XBox Indie Games already have demos, and there's no way to convert a purchase of a Lite version into a Full version. After reading the description, though, I'm okay with it--it's the exact same game but with fewer songs on the soundtrack. I beat every level in the game (on easy, but still), and I don't really remember the music standing out all that much. Then again, it may've stood out more if I only heard the same three songs playing over and over again.

I thought Karnn Age was definitely worth 400 points. It didn't take me a whole lot of time to beat on easy, but for that hour or two it's a very satisfying gameplay experience (and I may revisit the harder difficulties). Which one to buy (assuming you like it as much as I did), then, comes down to how cheap you are. If you want to see more games like this one (and I'd love to see more like this one), go ahead and shell out for the full version. If you're on a tight budget, at least the developer has given you a cheaper option.