KOVA is a science-fiction title about a protagonist named, Kova. A mercenary explorer who is after a lead on a job, this lead takes her across the galaxy, that is until her ship is shot down in an attack that renders her thrusters useless. She crash lands upon a planet, and in an effort to scavenge and find supplies, she comes across a beacon that activates, resulting in a signal chain reaction taking place across the galaxy. Kova ends up travelling to uncover the Fermi Paradox.
That’s the basic run down on the story, and it’s worth noting that this piece is from my time with the demo. Developed by Black Hive Media, the project is currently in crowdfunding stages, and at the time of writing this sits at $9,241, with the target goal being $28,000. We had a quick go on a short fifteen minute taster for the game, essentially a go at the first level.
The build we were supplied currently only supported controller, clearly a major focus of the developers, that said the controller was a good fit for the game; as it often is for platforming titles, and I was surprised to find such that – boy, they’ve really made the use of the controller layout.
Movement wise, the game felt rather fluid. The camera following Kova was smooth, and the aiming of a weapon felt nice and similar to titles such as “Soldat”. There is a melee hit button, and of course a crouch button for what I would imagine would be useful in future firefights, but doesn’t really have much use in the demo. The jumping system features a double jump, with the first jump being a really sloggy, heavy jump that doesn’t cover much vertical distance, with the second engaging thrusters for a quick push upwards.
One system that’s in place is the D-Pad’s “Quick Craft” which allows the player to whack the D-Pad and then press and hold an option to quickly craft the item. Players get to craft a new battery for their suits functions, ammo, health, and grenades.
It’s a cute menu, but at the moment it’s a bit bland and requires the user to assume what an icon means. Going onto the UI though, while it’s still heavily in development, it looks like it’s going to look stylistic and swish, although I hope that they don’t overdo it and make it a cluttered mess without labels on icons.
Graphically it looks marvellous. The particle effects occurring in the foreground add fantastic depth, as well as the foreground landscape objects going past, in an out of focus, and not so intrusive way. The interactive “plants” in the demo that you can smash up and shoot maybe blend into the world a little too well as it’s not entirely apparent where they are, and it’s not explained that you can jump up onto higher platforms that look like they’re background elements. The overall feel of the art is cold, and dark, and moody, and gritty. The UI that pops up blends into the foreground as if it’s actually a hologram coming from your character.
Sound effects and music sound wonderful, with the music resonating a lonely sort of ambience, but also a dramatic feeling, and the sound effects sound as if they’re well on their way to being a high quality production, but at this stage, I’m incredibly impressed by the sound work.
The demo seemed to end once I had reached a dim cave cave system, beasties hid in the dark waiting to be shot or bounded over. They don’t attack unless provoked, and even then seem more interested in chasing you away from themselves, pursuing for only a second or so. But anyway, it’s in this cave where I come up against a steep hill that looked like you could double jump it, but you actually can’t. Although I did manage – after several minutes of trying – to make it up, and it just leads to a dead end, and it’s with that, that I feel like the demo ends.
But anyway, I’m rambling, what I actually wanted to point out, was at this steep part. During my constant jumping against it trying to hop my way up and over, I ended up falling into the wall…originally I thought I had discovered a very secret doorway, but as I continued to run diagonally down and right, I eventually ended up hitting the bottom of the map. Not game breaking, but certainly a bug worth pointing out.
It’s not really worth delving too much into the elements such as UI, menus, and the like due to this being so early on, and the demo being purely designed to show off the atmosphere, the feeling, and functions. It looks like it’s going to be a solid game, and it’s still being crowdfunded, so if it sounds like something you’d enjoy, certainly head over and check out the Kickstarter. I also noticed a lack of an intro cutscene, instead, just dumping the players on a planet post-crash. I’d be interested to learn what style of cutscene they’ll be implementing! Will it be side-scrolling cut-scenes, or will they be more cinematic? The mind boggles.
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