I saw a streamer playing this, watched a few games being played, and thought it looked fun, so I bought it for the low cost of the few coins I had in my steam wallet from selling virtual stickers. Essentially free. After downloading and playing, I learned there's not really a tutorial mode for each game mode. They have bots for some of the modes, sure, and that'll help discern the general gameplay and controls, but not really the nuances. There are also game modes that simply have nothing by themselves. There's a dearth of information on the internet, so if one wishes to learn how to play these game modes, one absolutely has to play them either by streaming them or on someone else's stream, and hope it's a casual server. Good luck finding one of those, though. Even when the streamer is a casual player, it only takes one other hot-headed player to act like you've single-handedly ruined the run for everyone, and you suddenly find out you were in a competitive server the whole time.
Now I know someone is going to comment telling me I shouldn't be running willy nilly from one room to the next in quarantine, so I'm going to go ahead and say in advance, I'm not bad at games when I know the rules. I was not playing quarantine and I was not running willy nilly.
The first time was Dungeon Raid. I had stats that made me good for killing gargoyles, but was level 10 from having not played before. The very first enemy was a gargoyle. I did the only thing I could do, which was to !jump and volunteer. The streamer chose to put in the level 20 to take down the weaker gargoyle. That's fine. Streamer's choice. Near the end of the fight, right before the final boss, I was pitted against the highest possible level gargoyle and died without even doing half its health in damage. Not a big deal. It just meant I didn't get to level while the level 20 got to level up to... level 20.
The next fight, my stats were worse than just bad; they were detrimental to the team. As far as I'm aware, I have no control over that. I didn't volunteer once because I knew what would happen. Still, the streamer put me in, I died, and everyone's stats got changed. After that, everyone died one by one because of their new awful stats. My fault for getting sent in against my wishes to paradigm shift the entire raid, I guess.
It doesn't end with Dungeon Raid, though. Another game mode we played was Garden Invasion. I noticed right off the bat, some players were moving faster than others. The streamer commented on it, too, so I know it wasn't just me. For the life of me, I still can't find information online how they were moving so fast. Suffice to say, I was easy pickings any time I had to move. Since there's a several second delay between when I opt to move and when my character actually moves, I quickly learned I needed to watch chat instead of the stream, and make my move immediately after the person who is opposite me on the map. Well, that person ended up being someone who moved very quickly. The two of us would move nigh simultaneously, but it would take my character three seconds longer to finish moving, making me that player's unwilling decoy. Had I not been there, I presume the streamer would have b-lined for the other player instead. Still, I was shouted, by that player, for wasting lives. I can only imagine I was meant to not play at all, a kind of 'you need this much experience at this job to get this job' catch 22. Rather than point out the hypocrisy, I politely asked for constructive criticism. What was the constructive criticism? "Stop looking at the bloody stream and watch chat!" Thanks.
After experiencing some of the individual game modes first-hand, I've learned this is the kind of game you say 'is fun to play with friends', not because the game is fun but because your friends are fun. By themselves, the game modes just aren't refined enough, and I imagine that's due to the limitation of being stream-oriented games, a trade-off of gameplay versus socializing. When the social aspect is spoiled, however, there's not really anything going for Kukoro. Perhaps I was simply unlucky to join a group that takes the game more seriously than it deserves, and perhaps I could find another group elsewhere willing to be more cordial and engaging, but I can find fun players in good games just as easily as I could for Kukoro, perhaps even more easily. I may have paid virtual money for this, but I still feel like I paid too much.
Addendum - After my review, I was visited in my Twitch channel by Nau, the developer of Kukoro, which was pretty cool of them to check up on me and let me know my channel was nice and that it would be a shame if anything were to happen to it (kidding). I didn't have the bandwidth to articulate myself while actively streaming, but Nau was so polite and considerate, and I love talking game development, so I'm taking the time to respond to the comment left on my review and anything else I couldn't quite vocalize on stream in a comment of my own.
Addendum 2.0 - Apparently there's a character limit on comments. The short version is, it's impossible to separate community-interactions from community-based games, but people still have favorite and least favorite Jackbox Party Pack games, the ones they look forward to playing again even with a different group or the ones they dread even with a good group, and my reaction to Kukoro is similar to the latter. It's a game that looks fun when watching others play because it gives the illusion that those players have more control over their gameplay than they actually do. I'll take full responsibility for not noticing the "How to Play" button, but the only rule I was struggling with intuiting was the speed increase in Garden Invasion, and the explanation given runs contrary to the one player who was moving faster even before creating any plants, right as the game started, and openly bragging about moving faster the longer it took for the game to start. Now I suspect that player may have been cheating or found a glitch of some kind, but that's why I was struggling to understand how it worked. Anyway, I love the passion and innovation behind Kukoro, the same as I do for Katamari Damacy, but I don't enjoy it as a game. Still, I hope for the best for HeyNau and foresee in them a bright future.
