Kabitis 2: Fire Sword is yet another of literally thousands of 2D retro pixel platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere. This shovelware platformer is particularly badly made, slapped together with either node.JS or Construct (either way, a terrible choice to try to make a video game with). Owning this game now also gets you Kabitis for free, so you can play the original! Which nobody would want to! It's an action brawler with a bit of platforming and badly English translated storytelling as you jump around and slash your sword at stuff... which wouldn't be the worst idea if the technical implementation was even close to competent, but it's not.
From a technical perspective, the game doesn't meet basic minimum requirements that most PC gamers expect as standard.
A choice was made to use obsolete, decades old retro pixel "art" as a substitute for contemporary PC graphics. It's unclear if this is due to lack of budget or talent, regardless, the overall visual quality of the game is extremely low as a result.
There's no options to change the resolution for the game or customise the graphics settings. There's no way for gamers to ensure this is running at the native resolution of their displays... there's no guarantee this game will look right on any PC as a result of this hamfisted design decision. There's no way for gamers to try improve the low quality graphics.
Bewilderingly, the game doesn't include proper audio controls, so you can't turn off the annoying background music, you'll need to alt+tab out and stop the music using the Windows sound mixer. This is obviously not okay and it's unclear why the developers chose not to include this basic feature.
The controls can't be customised, which will be an annoyance for many, but it can also render the game unplayable for differently-abled gamers.
The controls and game handling are notably very clunky and unsmooth here. It's janky and unsatisfying to play... and any experienced gamer will tell you, the handling, responsiveness and general gameplay feel of the control scheme must be well polished for this kind of game to succeed. Unfortunately, this is something the developer seems to have phoned in, with little to no apparent gameplay testing. They dropped the ball on this one.
These technical defects push this game below acceptable standards for any modern PC game.
The poor quality of this game is reflected in the general public reception. At the time of this review, SteamDB shows the game only ever reached a peak concurrent player count of [b]just one player!!![/b]. This is a pitiful enough number, and now, the only player activity occurs once or twice a month, presumably someone loading it up to see what it is then quickly uninstalling it. Considering there's over 120 million gamers on Steam, the overwhelming lack of interest in the game is remarkable, but also to be expected. This complete and utter rejection of the game from gamers should be a keen information point for anyone considering buying shovelware like this. Gamers just didn't take this seriously, and for good reason.
Kabitis 2: Fire Sword has an overly optimistic price of around $5 USD, it's not worth it given the defects and shortcomings with the product, especially considering the sheer number of completely free, much higher quality games on Steam.
