Karina Katana

Игра "Karina Katana" приятно удивила! Несмотря на простой, казалось бы, геймплей (руби всех врагов, беги дальше), она цепляет своим динамичным экшеном и стильной пиксельной графикой. Боевая система отзывчивая, каждый удар чувствуется, а разнообразие врагов не дает заскучать. Особенно порадовал саундтрек – энергичный и атмосферный, он идеально дополняет происходящее на экране. Главная героиня, Карина, хоть и пиксельная, но обладает харизмой. Жаль, что сюжет немного банален, но это компенсируется ураганным геймплеем. Есть небольшие проблемы с балансом сложности, порой враги появляются слишком толпой, но это не критично. В целом, "Karina Katana" – это отличный слэшер, который подойдет любителям динамичных игр в ретро-стиле. Рекомендую!

brabo

It's really fun and the different skins and bosses are very cool!

☀️

Very good game, diversity and difficult levels.

"Karina Katana" is one of literally thousands of retro 2D platformers infesting Steam and lowering the average quality of all video games everywhere... and I'm not kidding. Searching for "platformers" on the Steam store page yields over 17,000 results! Is this one of the best of those? Absolutely not. This is a platformer mostly orientated around cringe because the subject is the developers imaginary girlfriend, who is a badly drawn MS-Paint sprite with crappy animations who has a katana. That's pretty cool and not at all cringey when your imaginary girlfriend has a katana. The platformer itself is 100% jank. Platforming is an old, mostly dead genre, and this lacklustre experience, while it doesn't have an upfront cost, isn't saving the genre... it's no surprise this failed to capture any attention from gamers in the era of immersive 3D gaming. The game is really simple and unambitious in terms of implementation, more of a tech demo or one of those cases where an amateur developer spends $100 to publish something on Steam Direct to see if it's possible. Yes, obviously it's possible. A proof of concept, tech demo, or something that's less than a little blip on the radar isn't offering anything truly valuable to gamers. In terms of visuals, this features really godawful MS-Paint tier "art" instead of real graphics. It's hard to say if this was because the developer didn't have the skill to do the job of creating 3D visuals, or couldn't afford to hire someone who does, but it also doesn't matter. What matters is that this looks much worse than most other games because of that decision, and that's a major deterrent to gamers. The deplorably bad visuals here come across as an insult to gamers. This was made with the godawful "GameMaker Studio" construction kit/toolset, which is popular amongst amateur developers because it handholds you through making really crap 2D games that you can publish for $100 on Steam Direct. This lets you pat yourself on the back for pretending to be a real game developer, which explains why GameMaker Studio is responsible for so much ignored garbage on Steam. GameMaker Studio has never really been used to make a truly successful game, but that doesn't stop people from trying and failing. It's a particularly bad game engine that can only be used for making low quality 2D products. Like this. You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear, as the old saying goes. Another reason this particular game wasn't successful. Now on to pricing and value for gamers. This is "free" enough (not every "free" game in the "free" section is truly free, there's usually some hidden price tag), at least you won't be expected to spend any more money after you download this, but just because something is free doesn't mean it's good, and the cost of a game is more than just financial, your time is valuable too. In terms of public reception, this failed. There's over 130 million unique gamers visiting Steam every month. SteamDB showed the game peaked at [b]only 4 concurrent players[/b]... this is a dismal public reception. This was so bad they couldn't even give it away. Since free games don't contribute to your game collector badge and other profile stuff, is this a worthwhile addition to your Steam library? This is a "nope". While it won't necessarily cost you money, the time and hard drive space it requires could be better invested in one of the many higher-quality alternatives on Steam.