The two Dutch game developers who make up Tangrin Entertainment describe themselves first and foremost as enthusiastic gamers who develop the kind of titles they'd like to play themselves. Their debut title, Kyn, is a mix of RPG and hack-and-slash, promising an action-packed single-player adventure. We tried out the beta version a while back, but the final version was released on July 28th. So keep reading to find out just what we thought of Kyn.
Hope from a Hole The game begins with the two main characters Bram and Alrik arriving back home after a long absence, where they are immediately confronted with some striking changes. While they were gone, their hometown of Vinborg was targeted by the enemy, and it's clear that the townspeople have suffered from the attack. Lucky for them, the two heroes have just completed their first magic ritual in a cave, which put their courage to the test. Having been found worthy, the two freshly-minted heroes set off on a campaign against the forces of the enemy.
After this short introduction, you take control of Bram and Alrik. The gameplay mechanics are nothing out of the ordinary, so the controls are pretty easy to get the hang of. The two heroes are move around the game map using the mouse. The perspective is the kind of top-down, third-person perspective typical of ARPGs, and you can also use the mouse wheel to adjust the height of the camera. There's a minimap to the right side of the screen that gives you a decent overview of the local area, and of course there's also a larger map you can call up as needed. You can gather information by speaking with NPCs, who speak to you in text boxes – no voiceovers at this time. Dialogues also allow you to activate quests in the main storyline as well as various side quests.
The quests are really entertaining and offer a good deal of variety. Early on, for example, one mission has you breaking captive warriors out of cages where the enemy's been holding them. Another time they have you protect a catapult from enemy attacks as you escort it safely to a bridge. Along the way, you'll also run across some puzzles that need to be solved. By the way, it's worth your time to explore all the accessible areas, since there could easily be a treasure chest waiting around just about any corner, usually guarded by monsters.
It's Dangerous to Go Alone! Fortunately, Bram and Alrik don't have to go it alone – in the course of your adventure, you can recruit up to four additional heroes. As in any RPG, each one of them brings their own particular skills and abilities to the table, which you can use in combat. Special abilities corresponding to the attributes Mind, Body, and Control offer everything you could want from an RPG – including healing, magic attacks, and resurrection. Each hero can choose only two special abilities to use at any given time, though. There's also a third, passive skill, which is bound to one of the various "feed stones" you will find during the course of your adventure.
Experience points come from killing enemies and completing quests, and you can use them to improve your heroes' stats. Since there are only three of these though – Damage, Armor, and Attack Speed – your options are pretty limited. One cool thing, however, is that you can reset your attributes at any time, which allows you to repurpose your heroes whenever your priorities change. Depending on your experience level, you can also upgrade your special skills. While a character at a lower level might be able to shoot arrows that slow your opponents down, at higher levels you can equip your arrows with fire, explosives, and poison, which allows you to deal much more damage.
In addition to special skills, there's also gear and other items imbued with elemental powers that you can use to advance through the game. You can get them by completing quests, looting enemy corpses, and completing the occasional puzzle. The treasure chests you run across – usually off the beaten path – can also contain new equipment. Your heroes' rather large inventory is divided into different categories: weapons, armor, items, quest items, and feed stones. If you move your mouse over an item, you can instantly see how it measures up in comparison to whatever you currently have equipped.
Against the Forces of Chaos, and Sometimes in Slo-Mo
If you come across an enemy or a group of enemies, your party can usually take them out with a spirited head-on assault. The number keys 1-6 are used to switch back and forth between different heroes in your party, and you're going to have to change heroes pretty often during dicier encounters, since if you want to emerge victorious form the field of battle, it's best to use as many special skills as you can. It's also really important to always keep an eye on your party members' health. Health does regenerate, but not in combat, and if a hero dies, they're stuck lying on the ground until the end of the fight – unless of course you use magic to bring them back to life.
When you do run into a real mass of bad guys, it's sometimes all too easy to lose control of the situation, especially when individual characters leave the group to go and chase after enemy archers. To help with this kind of situation, you can press the space bar to briefly slow things down, which can make things considerably less hectic, allowing you to focus on launching magic attacks or bringing your companions back to life.
If your whole party gets wiped out and you lose the fight, it sends you back to your last saved game, so make sure to quicksave often if you don't want to get tossed all the way back to the most recent autosave. Kyn has a pretty high difficulty level, even when you play on medium. Unlike in games like Gauntlet, where it only takes two or three good hits to put an enemy's lights out, an encounter with a large group of enemies in Kyn can get pretty dangerous pretty quickly, especially early in the game. Luckily, if you need to you can change the difficulty at any time.
Light Fare for RPG Fans Kyn is pretty much right above average when it comes to the technical aspects of the game. Tangrin's title doesn't quite reach the visual quality of a game like Diablo III, of course – the light and shadow effects, for example, are more or less par for the course, not setting any new standards. The same can be said for character design and animations. But Kyn is not a bad-looking game by any means, either. The graphics are done in a light, comical style, portraying a variety of different terrain types just begging to be explored. Various quests will take you to coastal areas, ruined harbors, picturesque forests, and snow-covered mountains, topped off by diverse weather conditions and a day/night cycle. Given the wide variety of settings, it's a shame that the enemies are more or less all the same. And certain areas are very sparsely populated with NPCs, especially when it comes to dialogue partners. When you do talk to NPCs, their backgrounds are usually pretty bland and uninteresting, which means that there's very little depth in the game apart from the quests themselves.
When I played the beta version of Kyn, I noted that the game had some problems with its AI, and unfortunately it appears that this issue has made it into the final version. In some cases, one or more heroes will neglect to defend themselves when being attacked by enemies. Also, you can usually get away with stealing gold from NPCs and not suffer any consequences, along with other questionable behaviors that go unchecked. In addition to these issues, the fixed camera perspective means that objects like trees and rocks keep getting the the way and blocking yor view, which is especially annoying when your heroes are in combat. They would have done a lot better to include a camera the player could rotate when they need to.
And since we're dealing in hypotheticals now – with a total of six protagonists, the game is practically begging for a co-op mode, but for some reason they decided to completely forego any kind of multiplayer. Like the Dragon Age games, Kyn is conceived as a purely single player adventure where you're in charge of several characters at once as they make their way through the countryside, managing their inventory along the way. This means you spend a lot of time making sure each of your heroes is optimized for battle.
As far as sound goes, Tangrin has done a great job with Kyn. The game features an impressive soundtrack with a great range of music and effects that fits the rustic Nordic atmosphere really well. The music includes some pretty catchy pieces that do a great job of "illustrating" the various landscapes in the game. The only thing I didn't like here was that there aren't any voiceovers, so players are just going to ave to content themselves with clicking through a series of text boxes. Given the overall comic style of the game, it makes sense that there's a good deal of humor in the dialogues, though some of the jokes are easy to miss in combat due to the fast scroll speed of the text.
nice game
Nice game
:D
like
Es