Recent reviews by Bonkus of the Konkus

As I get older, I have an increasingly hard time tolerating things that insist on a lot / a ton / a massive heap of my time. There's a strong subset of gamers who think my 100 hours in this game is just getting started (some might still trot out the old argument that I'm not even yet allowed to review the game), that every game should require a lifestyle commitment, be 47 years long or functionally infinite, and some even take a measure of pride in dumping these weeks of time into a game. Let's just go ahead and disagree about this matter as a measure of value. Time cost is basically what my recommendation turns on, and if you are not inclined to see this the way I do, I have no other major negatives to turn you away from it. This game takes a big chunk of time to get through (per what most people might think of as 'finishing' it). I don't feel like it was well spent time. It just pisses away the hours.

I may expand this review for informational sake, and because the developers certainly deserve a big round of applause for putting this all together - if nothing else, the experience side of this game is cohesive and compelling enough to keep people here for years in early access. It's just that the supply and demand sides of of video games are in a game of chicken over game length, and I am frankly exhausted.

I realize this is just a dismissive review, but I trust I can do that here. No, I haven't actually played for hours, I've actually played for about 15 minutes or so, idling the rest for cards, probably.

It's a dud. There are some ideas here (there always are) but just playing the dungeon crawling bits is a chore, boring and stiff. It all just felt lifeless and untested.

Not even worth it if you're a helpless anime undies addict. I never got near any, I don't think, but that's fine.

The score for this game need not hinge on whether it's an asset flip or not. It's junk, no matter the legitimacy of its creation. There's barely a demo here, sincerely.

I keep seeing this notion bandied about that it could be a game for children. People who say this must be calculating solely on the metric of the game's difficulty (a near zero save for a few bad platforming sections that might frustrate a child) - they probably don't have children and otherwise vastly underestimate them. Young kids in fact need BETTER stimulation to keep their young attention spans, not lazy crap. They won't care about the abstracted value that it could be someone's first game, for example. How an 18 minute playthrough managed to be insufferably repetitive is one for the scholars, but I was bored as a patient adult. Why would a child then find this thrilling?

I'm not going to bother reviewing the technical aspects, barely there as they are.

This is a solid title. I bought it blind, as is fun to do sometimes, and was mildly delighted with what I found.

The graphics, though yet ANOTHER entry in the pixel style glut, add a lot to the game. In particular, the animations actually provide helpful information about what works, how to do things, etc. I can't fault the designers here, stylistic approach worn thin or otherwise.

The audio is nearly as good, but not quite. It matches the presentation, but isn't as full or detailed. I muted it eventually to make room for listening to audiobooks.

The controls never let me down. The simplicity of everything at hand does a lot of the lifting here. That I don't even remember how the controls work, button for button, testifies to that - it's all so fluidly natural that I never even pondered it.

You run around as a brat, slipping and dodge-rolling behind innocent old folks, nursing home staff, security, and a host of more dangerous fellas, screaming to scare them. You make the old people faint, snatch their cash, and make for the exit. There are doors and environmental objects at your disposal to help aid or mask your activities. The challenges of each level arise from the way all of the elements are clustered. Arcade stealth silliness.

The only mandatory part of this challenge, which is to say the gate-keeping element of the game, is having all of the geriatric sprites knocked out of commission simultaneously for a moment, which opens the elevator doors to the next level. The nursing staff, in their ability to resuscitate the old folks or each other, are the biggest obstacle to this, forcing you to retrace steps and waste precious time if not careful enough in your planning. The aggressor NPCs provide mostly obstacles to your movement, in their myriad ways.

There are time and cash challenges for each level, which contribute to the old 'out-of-three' star rating given each completed level. As far as I could tell, a perfect run of star ratings never unlocked, advanced, or otherwise contributed to anything but whatever stock one puts in 'gamer pride' (none, myself) so I abandoned my perfect streak around level 95 of 99, as the levels started to get a little absurd for my level of commitment. However, if there are more endings than the one which I saw, this star rating is the only possible metric to affect it, and thus presents its place in the design.

Whatever compromise I made there was quite unpleasant, let me just say. I'd like to say something about the ending.

I'm not totally thrilled with the weirdly spiking violence that occurs at times through the game. It's not painfully tasteless or dark in tone - some moderating hand did its work here, one senses - yet there is still the matter of a small child (even criminal unruliness of the child does not excuse here) being shot and maimed in a few brutal death animations. For example, there's a 'robotic police officer' type enemy (it's no mystery) that kills you instantly if it sees you. You WILL die at least a few times at its merciless hands, and the results are ugly. It's just discordant to the rest of the game, which is overall very impish, but not so doggedly edgy.

The ending I saw employs the same eye-rolling edginess in a move motivated, I suspect, by misguided appeal to gamer humor. What was the point?

I liked the game well more than enough to overlook these few stupid decisions. It's short (in a good way), to the point, and fun.

Yes, I only played 21 minutes. If you're one of these people who thinks a person has to play a game for 1,000 hours before daring to criticize the fonts used in the game, find something more interesting to say. This is bad, and I determined this in fewer than 21 minutes.

The visuals will sell you, of course. The weird concept is neat. It does not play well. The difficulty spikes in a terribly uninteresting way. That last point is the real issue. Spikes in difficulty, even unfair ones? Not always an issue. Rather, it's that the whole game ends up painfully uninteresting, even for this type of game, often of passing interest by design. Nothing compels to get past the humps. Success in whatever it's trying to get you to do level to level seems disconnected from your own actions, and thus does not satisfy as gameplay. What a dud.

It's a mobile-ish reiteration of the send-out-your-troops-and-launch-attacks-on-timers sort of game that rewards CRITICALLY IMPORTANT upgrade points based on the old three star level performance rating. Yes, another game that becomes theoretically more difficult the further you go without perfecting every level left in your wake. Figure out the single way to beat the improbably difficult second level boss, and then... whatever. The star ratings serve better as an extra challenge, not as the bricks of the wall built to obstruct the main strut of the game. This is bad design.

And it's all just so uninteresting. This surprised me given the immediate oddity of the thing, normally a very appealing feature of a game. I don't know if I have issues with the controls. The minions seem not terribly interested in doing what you expect them to do. They'll kill things, not always the one attacking you. Yeah, if you fire one of your slow-to-load missiles or such at enemies, they die. There will usually be a prohibitive number more following right behind. You can use your pet to do whatever at times. I don't know whatever other greater sense of control I can take over the game. I don't know, I don't care. Too old for this. Not enough time to keep fighting with a game.

This was a ramble, but there's a point in there somewhere. Refunded on principle.

There's really nothing, save for its sequel, quite like Rock of Ages. It's not wholly unfamiliar, when you break it down to its parts, but the sum of the bits doesn't make for a game that even categorizes easily. It's a goofy mishmash of some seemingly familiar gameplay styles and genre conventions, yet it hardly seems to play like other games. Super Monkey Ball feels like the closest point of comparison. It's a weird thing.

The funny thing is that this title doesn't quite reach the fever dream weirdness of ACE Team's other titles, like Zeno Clash. Some of that is by design - the historical/art historical frame keeps things at least relatively familiar in presentation - but right where you might expect it all to get squirrelly, if you're prior familiar with the developers, it still feels like it has some kind of precedent. The boss battles are about as bizarre as the game lets itself get, and while there's something to appreciate in them (although we need to address these from a gameplay perspective shortly) you've... kind of... done this stuff before. The humor isn't going to fly over anyone's head, which isn't to say that it's not amusing. It just doesn't go totally off the rails at any point. Make no misake, though - this could have only come from ACE Team.

You play the game in two alternating modes. While each boulder, equating to your attack or a shot if you will, is being slowly built, you spend cash building traps and obstacles for the enemy boulder, racing to hit your castle at the bottom of a mirror of the track you'll traverse. The game really is, in structure, something of a race. The traps' designs provide mostly what effects you might expect, with the exception of the excellent flying catapult spotters, and all work reasonably well and do as they say on the box. This portion of the game is a little dry, it has to be said, and it's not always crystal clear how well your strategies will really work, but you will certainly notice the boon to your castle's life bar when your defense actually destroys the enemy boulder. It feels a little lightweight overall, but it basically works within ballpark estimations.

The other portion of the game involves taking your boulder for a spin down the progressively trickier (and more fun) tracks to bash the enemy castle. This portion is more fleshed out, but still not perfect. Careening around and jumping and bashing into enemy placements, destroying costly traps and environmental stuff alike, earns you cash for your own designs. However, it's necessary to be mindful of your boulder's health bar during all this, as your boulder slowly cracks and breaks down to two smaller sizes before finally just crumbling. From a defense perspective, the destruction of the enemy's matryoshka boulder is your goal. Each smaller size is logically less damaging to the enemy fortress. Somewhat costly boulder upgrades, each available only once per level, can help to deliver more damage to structures, provide more armor to make the trip intact, or even allow you to ruin the enemy's available trap building squares. These upgrades feel substantial. Finding keys, not too terribly hidden around the game, but often tricky to reach, unlocks various things and traps as you progress. Ultimately, if you haven't forgotten in all that, reaching the end of the enemy track with a full-sized boulder and slamming a sizeable chunk of their health bar is satisfying. The ceremony of crushing the enemy after knocking down their door is funny once, and then becomes an afterthought.

The damnedest thing here is the weird float to the feel of the boulder. It works, in the game, but it feels incorrect. You'll know it. It feels like a bocce ball sliding on a polished dance floor. Well, unless you go with the cube. Don't pick the cube, except for a laugh.

Then there are the boss levels. Points for trying ideas, here, but all four of these levels manage to be some new kind of terrible to have to play. It pains me to say it, ACE fan that I am, but they dropped th-... nevermind. The final boss gets a few participation points for managing to be the most odd, and most enjoyable to play (mind, the bar is Trinidadian limbo low). The dragon is horrendous any way you cut it. You may find yourself mulling far, far better ideas for bosses while trying to hit a statue in the wiener. Yeah, that's one of the boss fights.

Visually and audibly, the game has dorky charm to spare.

It's a lightweight title, and it lives up to being a fun, dumb distraction. It's a short game, but that's not a complaint, nor should it be. You don't need this game to be 2 years long.

Before we really get going, I'd like to put forth a thought. Had this game the slightest inclination toward comedy, I believe we'd all be sitting on more and fantastic sequels to this series in the years since. I'll get to why in just a minute.

This game is really just the most complete exercise in meaningful destruction I've ever played. It could read derisive to call it a hell of a tech demo with a GTA-shaped game wrapped around it, but it really is that. The thing is, I mean that as a compliment - for the 'tech demo' part. To cut right to the chase: blowing things up in all the creative ways the designers have allowed is a complete game in itself. The physics and whatever magic they implemented to make the loud, heavy, thudding disintegration of buildings and the stuff that gets folded under them is IMMENSELY satisfying. Yes, drop that mech, arms flailing, right through the roof of that building, and then just run through the walls of all the neighborhood. Watch the rebar and sheets of the buildings slide and crush enemies. Bail from your barreling garbage truck at the last possible moment to watch it plow through the base of the 100 foot tower strapped with remote charges and watch it all collapse like a stack of folding lawn chairs. Then do some of the main missions.

Conventional gun and bullet stuff? Drab as can be. The melee sledgehammer (also a wrecking tool, and a delight to smack into things) leaves guns in the dust, often even pragmatically. Rockets and super rockets? Remote charges? Those are in the destructive toolkit, and we're back to good. You see the categorical distinction. The nano rifle - that's a treat. I never used the machine gun.

The myriad other flaws: There's way too much space, too many doinky side missions. It offers the bane of third-person action games, "collect 300 ____" as if anyone needs that waste of time. Driving is... driving. Checkpoints are hit and miss, the game suffers 'last mission overload syndrome', and the presentation... well, let's address my initial proposal.

The most entertaining things I did in this game were all on some level funny. Gutting a building from beneath the feet of my enemies never got old. Trying to speed away from a hellhole of bullets and blue shooty stuff, launching my vehicle weirdly into the air over an incline ("Mars physics" gets to do a lot of sweeping under the rug at times) and hitting an aerial gunship type thing cresting over that mountain? I had to pause the game for a minute. Using a building to crush another building? Sometimes you run out of ammo. The fact that you can DESIGN to do all of these things and carry them out more or less successfully (let me know about your car/airship successes) makes this game red meat to your lunatic inner child monster. Jetpack hammer drop on enemies and even buildings I was taking down? Became a regular part of my arsenal. Get the big rockets as soon as possible.

So when the game tosses you generic stoic gruff-voiced power fantasy hero who was 'just trying to make a living and keep their head down' to lead super-serious-revolt-against-omnipotent-corporation #473 who killed his rebel brother (of course), and your character speaks only the answers or the pertinent questions with his just the right amount of IQ and grit, and basically personifies a working man's worn work glove... yeah, it disappoints. There's a reason the Doom guy doesn't talk.

That the game itself never loosens up is a major drag, too. This is the game that let me smack an explosive barrel with my sledgehammer into a gas station 50 yards away, melt the enemy's turreted cars, then gorilla charge them with my hammer and scatter them two at a time like screaming croquet balls. YES, MELT. How does this game never crack a chuckle? Meanwhile, the music swells like when the soldier removes his helmet and looks out over what's left of Normandy. This should have been Kerbal Space Program on pixie sticks. Were that the case, even the human stubbed out cigarette of a main character would have added so much in sharp contrast to the absurdity, instead of just being empty, bland writing. I mean, he has all the makings of a classic straight man, and no one is telling any jokes. Or, you know, give me chipper Pollyanna with a sledgehammer. Anything but this meeting of Ford trucks and Marines advertisements.

The story is dumb.

And it all fits just a tiny bit awkward within the GTA-style frame. You only ever work for one faction (the Red one, I believe), but the layout is plain to see. Go to far-flung icon for activity. Random events pop up. The world never really feels that alive - there are really just a lot of cars in your way, or at your disposal. This format is actually the most dated thing about the game. It's not a crippling problem.

It looks fine, otherwise there's always the redux. The sound is deliciously crunchy.

Anyway, go tear something apart.

Shear off all the fat, and this game is really just a second helping of the first game with a little more garnish. This is a perfectly acceptable thing. Of course, the fat is what we really need to discuss.

First, the good - the game plays well, looks... fine. It sounds slightly less fine, given some wonky voice acting and forgettable music. This is really simple, actually; if you've played a space - sorry, underwater - shooter before, particularly from the roughly 2000 era, you know what you're getting into. It's a solid entry in that vein, neat atmosphere. Overall fine missions, some particularly fun, a few absolute clunkers. It's a 200_ action shooting thing. You know if this is your bag already, but hold your seahorses, because we still need to address all that needless fat.

It's more or less ALL of the presentation of the game.

Aquanox 2 is considerably more self-serious than the first game. This is a downside. You should be deducing that the writers didn't have the chops to support this shift in tone. The dialogue, the story... let's address that in a minute.
The visuals follow this tonal shift, at least in the story/interstitial bits of the game wherein you yak with your crew and buy crap for your ships. The art is okay, technically, but it has no character. Everybody is darkly attractive. Neat.

The newly irritating feature of the game (there had to be one!) is the rejiggered forced dialogue interactions themselves. In the first game, you had to talk with various NPCs at the game's locations to progress the "story" and unlock missions, mandatory and optional alike. It's the same with the sequel, only rather than funnel all of the conversation options through a simple and convenient menu list of people who want to grab your ear, in this game you have to bounce back and forth in various sublocations to skip the terrible pablum with the uninteresting denizens of the world. 'Oh, it's immersive; you gotta trek all the way down to the trash chute to hear what brooding vaguely misanthropic man has to contribute to the game of telephone. Now, back up to the wharf with you'.
Really - the writing is not going to rivet you, and you'll probably get tired of poking around like you're playing a hidden object game just to move on. It's not like it's really fleshed out in any way to be interesting or really part of the gameplay. This crap could've been handled so much better.

Again, most of this jabber fetch quest is mandatory, and laced into this badly designed mechanic are the missable dialogue options that unlock secret levels. If you're a stickler for seeing every level, this game might rub you the wrong way (more on this in a minute). After about the third time going from some lounge area to a city dock and back just to talk to these anustubes - who can't be bothered to just stand together for my sake - all just to get to the next bit of shooty poot, I was irritated and couldn't even be bothered to worry about whether I was choosing the right obtuse order of conversation partners to unlock all of the secret levels. I missed a few, says a bonus objective walkthrough I used. They might have been fun levels, but I'll never know.

Part and parcel with that missing level feature is the aforementioned bonus objective system in the game. Sometimes bonus objectives are kind of hinted at by in-mission events or dialogues, but far too many are a complete guess - such as the literal guesswork of finding unhinted stationary disabled freighter ships often tucked at the end of time-wasting voyages through the barren underwater landscapes. The rewards from these objectives would often be worth their completion, to add insult to injury, and might yet play into unlocking optional missions as well. I don't know for sure. This game just begs to be punched at times.

The writing in the game truly is abysmal. That story... Look, this isn't your garden variety bad video game story. We're talking an aggressive, holy Streisand abomination. Cap this off with a ponderous and stupid ending cinematic (crying nude Asian angel, why not) that does its damnedest to ruin the game. This had to be a decision made at about 4:30 on the last Friday before the game shipped.

Just get it cheap enough and do the shooting stuff, and it's fine. Really, it's fine.

This one is a reserved thumbs up with caveats. Take a look at those right off the bat here and we can weed out a lot of people who won't need to play this game.

-If you aren't a fan of old games, this one is about as "old game" as an old game can get. It feels precisely like 2001. That's something I, among many other people, actually like and look for. It just has that old THQ flavor. I'd say skip if that doesn't likewise explicitly interest you, as there won't likely be much else worth it for you.

-This game is prone to bug out a little. It's not frequent. I only had two occasions in which a bug caused an actual problem, but one is possibly a deal breaker for you. More below.*

That out of the way, I enjoyed my time with this game. There's something satisfying about simple, relatively short (7 hours, roundabout) action games that don't demand a lot of investment (seriously, I could use more of this in modern releases, everything doesn't need to be "Breath of the Wild"). I scratched that itch here. I wouldn't have enjoyed it carrying on forever. For whatever convergence of reasons, the roughly 2000 era of games offered up a lot of this kind of game. Whee.

There isn't a lot to say, frankly. It really is what it looks like in the screenshots. You can guess at most of the things you'll be doing. No big surprises.

All of the technical measures of the game are solid. That said, let's lay out those aforementioned bugs, as I think this is the critical point I have to offer.

A seldom occurrence that never mattered too much during the game was a weird event triggering problem that, while it never outright failed to initiate the next event or sequence, sometimes took weirdly long times. You dawdle around in the water wondering what's next, and then the next objective or scripted bit seems to wake up a little late. Not a huge flaw.

*The big issue I encountered was one that only occurred late in the game, as by design it only could have. You have a range of ships at your disposal in the store. The final, and arguably and presumably best (of two candidates, more in a second) has a consistent and game-breaking bug. The ships have an EMP shield in addition to standard health bar. Essentially, if reduced, your ship is stunned for a few seconds. The bug with this final ship is that it doesn't recover control after your shield has regenerated. This can't possibly have been a designed feature in the game. All I found myself able to do during the last and longest mission, after incurring this paralysis, was use the booster. Jetting forward, effectively disarmed, at a weird angle into the dirt, getting shot right up the ass. It's well nigh impossible to tackle this last mission without getting stunned at least once.

Now, as I was getting around to saying, this only seems to affect this ship - go ahead and sum your own irritation at not getting to use the big gun for that. One can downgrade to the second highest option (posited as the tankier option compared to the sequentially ultimate ship being more nimble by a mile) and avoid the bug, sure. However, one of the timed and critical objectives in that final mission involves maneuvering and shooting a small moving target at the front of a large enemy. This is maddeningly difficult in the slower ship. It works fine prior in the game, but that last mission needs maneuverability.

Mind you, this game does not feature mid-mission saving or checkpoints of any sort. So, after failing the first attempt honestly, being bug-crippled in the second attempt, and staring down an irritating waste of my time from the beginning of a long mission yet again, I just cheated the last mission and will now get on with my day.

It's fun, but buyer beware.

I want to make clear off the bat that I'm throwing this game JUST to this side of "recommended". In short, the central story mode is acceptable, dumb fun. All the peripheral and extra stuff varies from embarrassing on many levels up to segments you'd wish they just laced into the main chunk of game.

Let's breeze through the bits unnecessary to elaborate too much on.

You can see the visuals and nothing I'll say will dent your opinion there one way or the other. Audio is almost as stylish, save for the often bad voice acting. Moving on.

The controls mostly do what you expect them to for this type of game, a few little odd things thrown in to suit some unusual but mostly minor gameplay mechanics. Some things are a little fiddly, but nothing is out and out broken here. Nothing to get a headache over in game or in this review.

Story... I don't know. I skipped through it, knowing to expect a "whoa, nutbars!" sort of deal. The only comment I'll make is that when everything is turned up to 11, it quickly stops seeming so loud. Nonetheless, it threads together the interesting bosses and occasionally neat levels. You can make your own case here, but I doubt it will make or break the game for you.

Level designs and enemies and bosses are really what the game has going for it. A good variety of things to do and see, generally pretty well paced, shy a few obtuse objectives. Here's your game, now go tear it to shreds.

In all, it makes for a central game with enough polish to make a play through fun the first time. It doesn't overstay its welcome.

Now, let's address the dead weight in the game.

Conventional side missions make up the bulk of what I'm talking about. They link to completed central missions, usually take place in the same levels, and offer little challenges varying from short, pointlessly easy tasks to fairly difficult things that rival the main missions. On a separate scale, these side tasks also vary in quality, as stated above. A handful are downright terrible. A small few are better than some of the core missions. The overlap of those two scales is not exactly as you would expect - some of the short and simple levels are some of the better ones, some of the harder and more involved ones are just a slog. A big old mixed bag these, but dipping on average below the main campaign in quality. I'll remind you that I don't revere the core game so much that I give these side missions very much room to fall in quality before I consider them a waste of time.

Then we have the 'girl' missions. You go on bizarrely structured date missions in which you try to... look at various parts of the subject woman whens she's not looking, raising your something meter ("boner!" shouts the 11-year old) while trying not to piss her off because you're staring at her crotch and chest - deadly realism here. You give her gifts, fill up a heart meter thing, you use x-ray goggles to ogle her underwear at times... and you end up with a new weapon and a notch on the belt. This whole chunk of the game is an embarrassment. To begin with, it feels broken half the time. Looking doesn't always seem to score the points it seems like it should. The gift hint thing, part of the x-ray feature, is wonky. It's also obviously sexist - but, mind you, it's far too knuckle-headed to actually be offensive. It's just the bit that, in a game full of things and scenes that would be hard to explain to someone who walked up and watched for a second, really stinks of being the hardest to explain away. Good luck defending the precious sanctity of video games here.

One girl mission is different, acting more as a challenge mode menu. You find her hiding (in vases often) throughout the main game's levels, and each find unlocks a new challenge level. Defeat a few enemies using only the punch. Use only your sword. Kill them in size order. Don't get hit. These are mostly irritating, either for being silly difficult or just unnecessary. Beat enough of these, she hops on you and gives you some upgrade, blah blah, same as the rest. Ever-so-slightly less embarrassing by design, but still stupid. I didn't find the rewards worth it, for the record.

These girl missions are totally optional save for the fact that, if you deduced this from above, it's how you unlock the other weapons in the game. At least one, the drill, is necessary to find secrets and things in the game. Ugh.

Buying the skill and attack upgrades with points dropped by enemies is fine, given how typical this type of system is. You otherwise level up automatically through drop gathering in game. The money/mission rating system really only plays into the game via the gift shop, which is mostly full of expensive crap you give to the gallery of crotches.

The padding in this game drags down the basic dumb fun of slicing bizarre things into pieces. To take my suggestion and simply play the story missions, you may look at the sheer volume of optional game missions on your map and feel like you're missing too much to be done with it. Therein is the problem. The better side stuff could have just been mandated in the normal levels. The weapons and upgrades could have been tied to progress in a less cumbersome way. The game would have been tighter overall.

A 7/10 that edges toward a 6/10 the more you play.