Captain Kaon

If cult classics like Gravitar, Sub-Terrania, Solar Jetman and Thrust tickle your fancy in any way, shape or form, the gameplay and mission structure of Captain Kaon will be right up your alley. I, for one, love these exploratory thrust physics shooters where the objective is as much about piloting safely through twisting caverns with cargo dangling precariously from your ship as it is engaging with hostiles. Captain Kaon features satisfying twin stick shooting, doing away with a particular oldschool restriction where fixed aiming meant pointing your spacecraft squarely at your target -- not the simplest of tasks in cramped quarters with gravity's perpetual pull! It's a welcome, distinctly action-oriented modernization of the retro formula that Captain Kaon riffs on and, paired with frequent directions provided during any given mission, it makes the game far more accessible than its forebears. A non-linear campaign, an arsenal that grows progressively larger with completed missions, customizable loadouts that let you pick and choose your primary/secondary weapons plus a variety of ships to unlock all work to fill out the package quite nicely. This was a day one purchase for me and I'm looking forward to playing (and inevitably replaying) the full set of Ceres missions! :) On the Early Access front, my experience with the game included its fair share of bugs, rough edges and weirdness but nothing unpatchable. Captain Kaon, as of today, has been fully released but there's still a bit of iffiness with regard to controller support. Anyone hoping to use a favourite non-X360 gamepad would be well advised to run a controller emulator like x360ce as generic USB controllers, such as a Logitech Dual Action, aren't supported. Things get a little bit trickier then that, though, as it's possible to switch control priority over from mouse/keyboard to gamepad even while an unsupported generic USB controller is connected (suggesting that the gamepad [i]is[/i] detected), causing the mouse pointer to vanish and leaving no means to navigate the menu or revert to mouse/keyboard. This borked setting saves between sessions and it's only after a certain amount of blind clicking around that the game switches back to mouse/keyboard at the title menu. With all that out of the way, I'm happy to report that Captain Kaon plays really rather well with an Xbox 360 controller, although certain menus such as mission selection and loadout adjustment feel a bit clunky in their implementation. Configuration is quite spartan at present, with display options providing a choice of windowed 1280x720 or scaled fullscreen, audio options nowhere to be found and no freedom to rebind controls. Default bindings are perfectly sensible for QWERTY keyboard users, though. Nothing technical-wise here is a dealbreaker for me, but I must admit that the controller issues described above made for a bit of a rocky start. This is a super cool game and I [b]strongly[/b] recommend checking it out if you're craving something thrust-y.

My son created this game and I bought it for his nephew , my grandson has found it challenging and enjoyed the graphics and will play it again next time he visits.

30년 전에는 이런 게임들이 꽤 있었습니다...는 그때도 슈퍼패미콤 시대구나? 실례, 정정하겠습니다. 35년 전에는 이런 게임들이 꽤 있었습니다...... 그러니, 그 때 게임하던 어린이들은 과거를 떠올리며 이 게임을 재미있게 할 수 있을 겁니다. 의외로, 정말로 재미있어요. 꼭 그 시절 그 게임들처럼요.

Playing Captain Kaon takes me down memory lane, to the days of my childhood. When you use to hang out at the old corner shop, either before or after school, and starve yourself through the lunch breaks. Just so you could blow your tuckshop money on the old coin op consoles or Pinball machines. The days when 20 cents would give you anywhere up to two hours (YES a whole two hours, of pure unadulterated pixelated fun), before you needed to pop in another coin. The pinballs were on the decline and the new shiny consoles were making the grade, Space Invaders, Pacman, Galaga and Defender. Your score would be the talk of the day, nay of the month, till it was beaten. Yep, in those days you truly would be the legend in your own lunch time. It is the last one, Defender, that Captain Kaon mostly reminds me of. A side scrolling space tunnel shooter (well, that what I use to call them). You could plod through the enemy, tactically eradicating them slowly, or for fits of giggles, go full warp shooting like a wide man screaming ‘DIE MUTHU FRACKER!!’ till you either went splat against a wall or and enemy ship managed to pop you off. Captain Kaon is no different. You, a rookie fresh out of the academy, is assigned to the Argus, a recommissioned battle cruiser, which is part of a slapped together defence force for earth. The cool kids, with gnarly ships get to play lazer tag with the enemy alien force, in some far part of the galaxy. While you stay behind and babysit a Miners revolt on Ceres. You start off with the WASP, the latest technically advanced gunship, from 30 years ago, and blast any invaders who happen to pop up the their badass ugly heads. Your first two missions are training levels to get use to the ship. You use your WASD keys for the usual directions and Q and E to strafe left and right. The momentum physics are easy to adjust too but hard to master, as you will bump and bounce around the walls like a pinball till you get a handle of it. Handling is like trying to roller-skate on an ice-rink while eating a very hot pie with cools hands, fun and frustrating at the same time (unlike Star Control, which was like trying to eat a frozen pie, on an oiled ice-rink, on an erratic hover board, remote controlled by a jilted lover). The frustrating part is you will forget which direction your nose is facing and can end up loosing half you life trying to stop ploughing the walls or getting unstuck from corners. Fire control is done via the mouse and your gun rotates 360 (Missiles and bombs too). On one hand this is great, you can hover in place while you pick the enemy off in any direction. The down side is while you are flying, you have your attention divided. You are either ploughing into walls while you are concentrating on shooting, or wasting ammo shooting like a Storm Trooper while concentrating on your flying (I am a man, I can only concentrate on one thing at a time! Shoot enemy or avoid wall or pee pants, not all at once!). The tunnels are in maze form so there is no hitting the throttle and blasting through the levels (sad face), and you need to open doors or hidden areas by either picking up power cells and dropping them off at the required slot, passing through lazer trip wires or grappling levers to pull on or off. The grapple hook is frustrating, there seems to be no ‘let go’ button. So you need to pull away from some levers, which in turn makes them bounce back to their off position (and plough you face first into a wall). When you do get skilled on your controls though, you can start to hoon around the area in a fashion that would make Ken Brock (or any Drift star) proud. You can refill on ammo and health at any time by returning to the Argus or finding refill stations, if there are any around, but there may be restrictions on hight levels (I suck, so still on level three but having fun dying). If your are after latest 3D render and shadow effects then walk away now, you are too cool to hang with us Eggheads. The graphic are retro geeky gorgeous. From the intro, menus, popup talkies from your comrades, to the ships. It is all 80’s style pixel art, giving this game a homely feel. The music is also 80’s fantabulous. At the right ambient level so as not to be annoying to make you turn it off and fits this game like a glove. Story is lite and typical of 80’s games so no in depth love triangle or buddy revenge. There is a little confusion provide by the summery on Steam and in the actual game. On steam it states that you are Captain Kaon, a woman who was facing Court Martial, when suddenly the war started. In the game you are a Captain Kaon a female rookie from the academy. If this affects you mindset during play, well boohoo princess (your character is a girl after all). Me, I’m a D.I.L.L.I.G.A.F. kind of guy, plus, in the 80’s you don’t need no reason to blow away green alien butt! There are still more features to be implemented by the developer, that hopefully will add to the game play and not subtract (Screen resolution, key binding, missions on Mars). I can see this one becoming a classic, so if you are a person wanting to relive your 80’s-90’s childhood or a young person who enjoys retro games, Captain Kaon by Engage Pixel (James Buckle) is a must have in your library. Original review can be found here https://cassus.org/muut/#!/action for all your Inde gaming disscussion.

Good fun retro game. Looks like it should have been released on the SNES, like Thrust crossed with an old Japanese shoot em up, and just as much fun to play.

Captain Kaon is a retro space shooter where you can use various ships to shoot in various sections of the planet. You have your main weapon to shoot and you can use your precious and few missiles for higher damage to other ships or extructures on the level. It's colorful and I needed to get used to control the ship while trying to aim for better accuracy. The music is very, very repetitive, the options are limited, the performance could be better and the game runs at 30 fps locked. If you feel nostaligic and loved this type of games from the past then you are sure to enjoy this particular game. Score: 5/10 My "30 Minutes of Gameplay" video from the game: https://youtu.be/4TzYPCHMjLI

I am writing this not to talk about the game's positives, but about its negatives, which are far more obvious and significant when playing. The game is divided into two campaigns, Ceres, the one you start on, and Mars. Each campaign is divided into sectors, and you must defeat each sector, which is one map. You control a small vessel and fly it in a side-on view. You can rotate and thrust your ship, and pick up and drop certain items. Your gun can fire in any direction, controlled by the mouse, and you have three secondary rockets or bombs. You have a mission, which varies each map: it might be to pick up a Marine APC from your ship and drop it in a certain location, or destroy three enemy targets, and so on. There are gun turrets which open and fire at you, pods that fire at you and are released from buildings, doors or shields that block progress, and sometimes you need to land on one platform to get a battery that you pick up and take to a socket. Nothing too complicated. As you complete each sector it brings you closer to completing the campaign. It also earns 'fleet resources', which you can use to automatically win a sector, or to build improved weapons or ships. These are lost when you die though (you have three lives in a mission). So the gameplay is fairly simple and not very interesting, as are the graphics. Those in a sector are adequate, definitely looking like an earlier era, while the animated sequences, introducing the story, are just bad. Gameplay can be frustrating, since on harder missions you get swarmed by enemies, which cluster around you making it difficult to aim accurately or even move. Since they keep spawning from their silos it can be difficult to even reach the silos to destroy them. A lot of the achievements give you no idea what to do to achieve them, which is a major failing. Plus the bugs affect the achievements. I gained an achievement before I even started playing, and didn't get one for completing the Ceres campaign without failing a mission. [h1]The Bugs, the bugs[/h1] You can fly through certain scenery. You can see an indicator of where your ship is, but you can't see which way it is facing, which is crucial. Unless you immediately spin the ship around and thrust back out, there is a good chance you will get stuck somewhere 'behind' the level, fruitlessly spinning and thrusting, trying to get the ship moving towards open space again. And the big one, the really big one is: you can't play the Mars campaign. You can start it certainly, but as soon as you try to start the first mission the game crashes back to the desktop. This is such an utterly obvious problem that I cannot see how the developer did not fix it. He isn't around any more to do anything about it. So for these reasons, this is very much a [b]thumbs-down[/b] to the game.

Retro style with solid controls, easy to get stuck into a 'one more level' loop.

3/10 got boring fast, play time is from card farming

Got this game via Keymailer and decided to give it a shot last night. Sadly enough my experience wasn't so fantastic. The first thing after starting up the game that i noticed is that the text for the intro went WAY too fast. I might not be a natively english speaking person but my english is proper enough to keep up with most conversations. Sadly enough the intro text went so fast i didnt even have time to narrate it for my viewers. That aside i still decided to check out the game further. I started the first mission and noticed the music, owh god the music. I hate to say this, but that stuff REALLY needs an upgrade. The music consists of a small sound sample of i am guessing rougly 5 seconds long that KEEPS looping. Needles to say that kinda gets annoying after 5 minutes, might wanna get something better ;) Besides that the first level went fine but i did noticed a bug or 2 here and there. One of these bugs i noted is that when you are carrying a FR Crate with your ship and it explodes due to gunfire or crappy flying, the Grapple stays "deployed" but in such a state that it does NOT grapple anything until you retract it by pressing S It took me a few minutes to find this out and it wasn't game breaking but it was a bit annoying. 3 missions orso later i found myself on a mission where i had to infect something with a "virus data packet" i believe. Being a bit cloudy in the head sometimes i find this data packet and deliver it to my starting point, thinking it will give me another weapon unlock, WHICH it actually accepts. me thinking this is normal i continue with the mission just to find out that i now CANNOT complete my mission anymore because that was the "virus data packet" i was supposed to deliver to the end of the map in order to complete it. This bug is game breaking and really needs to be adressed ;) before kinda being done with the game i was being silly and fired a missile at one of the boulders that seemingly made it's way to the end of the map because i wanted to see what would happen. Result: The game instantly crashed. (You might wanna fix that too) Bugs and annoyances aside the game is fun to play, but before i will actually recommend this game it might need a patch or 2. Hope this review will help you improve the game. Looking forward to it ~ General M-13 twitch.tv/generalm13