First off I do recognize that this is a student project and so some jank and lack of polish is to be expected and for what it is they killed the aesthetic and I wouldn't mind seeing more from this team.
However looking at the other reviews here I feel like a crazy person, like we played completely different games. So, what this is is a third person beat-'em-up. You've got a lock on, a dash, a heavy combo and a light combo that you can alternate between for different moves, a charged attack, and a super. With that, you're moving through a short series of floating islands in space fighting space dinosaurs while a nova in the background talks ♥♥♥♥ at you, after a dozen or so islands you fight a final boss, credits roll
19 minutes was my playtime. With messing with the god-awful camera sensitivity, watching the opening cutscene, dying once, and the credits it was really about 10 minutes. After reading the other reviews here I played through it a second time, this run took about 9 minutes skipping everything just to see if I missed anything. Time for some real criticism.
First off, performance. I played this on the Steam Deck and it struggled to keep a consistent 30fps with it normally ranging between 15 and 45. There's just not enough going on in the game to cause this nor for both sets of requirements to be as high as they are. There's also no graphics settings to adjust to fix this but again student project. Your mileage will vary.
Then there's the combat. As mentioned before the combat system actually has a little bit of depth to it but a few things kill it. You never need to do anything more than mash the light combo. It's genuinely the single most efficient thing you can do, partially because the poor performance means trying to actually use combos rarely works but also because you attack just about as fast as you can mash. This isn't helped by the fact that enemies only have one or two attacks including the final boss so you just rush up, mash, if it survived long enough to swing back dash behind it and mash some more. Furthermore you heal and gain Ultimate energy on combos so again it's more efficient for you to mash over trying to engage with the system. I also never used the lock on even once, the camera for it sucks and there's a soft-lock anyway that sticks you to an enemy as you mash. There is no challenge, I don't know where the other reviews got "challenging combat" from. The review calling it a Soulslike and putting it up with Lies of P, DS2, and Hellblade, and wanting an easy mode has to be a troll.
Everything else is just a mixed bag. I don't even remember if there was music or not and the rest of the sound design left no impression. VFX were fine, no complaints. Other reviews talk about lore, world building, and tension and I can only assume they were on drugs because the only amount of any of those were the titular Kilonova vaguely alluding to a past where it killed your planet wrapped up in a middle schoolers idea of evil dialogue. Ending was bad too, you kill the final boss and then walk up to the nova, do a ground pound, it dies??? And then the credits roll. Character design and general aesthetic were really good, no complaints there either and wouldn't mind seeing more of it. I also don't understand some of these playtimes, there's no replay value though again it's a student project so I wouldn't expect it.
All in all though it's like a solid 2/10. I was genuinely surprised when the credits rolled partially because it was so short but also because of how many people worked on this. Students or no I've seen longer, more polished games come out of one-person studios and game jams. Maybe that's too harsh, who knows. For as negative as this is I do hope the team takes it in stride and improves. The combat and movement were solid despite the flaws and again the character design and aesthetic are killer. And I like their logo. I can't personally recommend it, short and free though it is, but I guess if you've got a few minutes then downloading it lets the team know people want more and that works out either way.
