Do I think what you get when you buy the game is worth the purchase price? Yes, I do.
Would I say that if the price were higher? ...let me get back to you on that, but for $5, you could do a lot worse.
Karmaflow is a game I'd been meaning to get to for a while, more or less ever since I saw the cast list, which includes singers from such bands as DragonForce, Epica, and Sonata Arctica. I essentially bought it for the music, and that aspect of it certainly pulls its weight. If you like metal, the soundtrack that comes free with the game is worth the purchase price on its own, and the Deluxe Edition DLC has even more of the good stuff.
With that in mind, the actual game mostly just has to not be terrible... which it mostly manages. From a gameplay perspective, it's a puzzle platformer made by people who like puzzle platformers; the potential pitfall in this is that they seem to assume some familiarity with platformers already. The controls are frequently less than forgiving, and the game is not particularly interested in holding your hand (which I can respect, but I would have liked a [i]little[/i] more hand-holding. And either a manual save system or a few more checkpoints). There are a few spots where the game takes camera control out of the player's hands, and not coincidentally, those tend to be the hardest parts of the game (look, if I can't see both where I am and where I need to jump to, that's a [i]problem[/i]).
The story is up to rock opera standards (i.e. an afterthought - and I say this as someone who likes Avantasia), though I don't think I agree with the decision to [spoiler]require all the worlds to be destroyed to get the true ending[/spoiler], especially not when there's very little to hint that that's what you're supposed to do ahead of time. The charitable term for such things is a "bold" narrative choice. Not only that, most of the characters in each world [spoiler]want you to sustain the worlds[/spoiler], so you're also going against the NPCs - and if you're an RPG player, trusting NPCs that haven't given you a reason not to trust them is not an easy habit to break.
My freshman year of college, some of my suitemates played Assassin's Creed 2, and they were of the opinion that the major difference between AC1 and AC2 was that the question with AC1 was "can we make a game out of this at all?" and with AC2 it was "all right, we've proven we can make it at all, now can we make it [i]really good[/i]?" I'd really like to see someone do something similar for this: now that we know the concept is workable at all, really tighten up the execution.
tl;dr: I got it for the music, the music rocks (so to speak), and the rest of the game is not worth negative money.
