Oh, boy. Listen, I really wanted to love Armikrog, so much so that I stuck it on our August cover issue. And while the beta was nice, things quickly started to look bad after the game missed its launch window. The idea of a new game from the makers of The Neverhood, via Kickstarter, in a claymation style, with the voice talent of MST3k star Mike Nelson, and as a point-and-click adventure game had me all sorts excited. It’s unfortunate that so many aspects of Armikrog fall flat.
The game see’s our hero and his pet space dog crash landing on an alien world. Your job is to figure out what’s going on and presumably get your butts off the planet and back home. It’s a simple enough story that offers up a ton of avenues for wild and wacky situations. And while the games writing is pretty good, the underlying gameplay does little to help the game stand out. Puzzles are all really simple and straightforward to figure out, with hints presented to you in various ways as you proceed, and while I do appreciate an easy puzzle here and there, not expanding and forcing players to really rack their brains is disappointing. Match these symbols to this panel, find a lever and stick it in the nearest empty slot, unscramble some tile based puzzle, and on and on with each repeating over and over again. Sure, the game is fun, but it does little to draw you into the world around you, especially when there are like only three puzzle types in the whole game. Another problem lies with the way much of the story is presented to the player. Characters will speak to you in English, but during story cutscenes an alien language plays without subtitles. These cutscenes are pretty long too, so things get really boring and monotonous.
Armikrog looks gorgeous.
Graphically is where Armikrog really knocks it out of the park. The clay animation style used by the team is simply incredible. Both characters and the world that they inhabit are all handled with amazing care. Everything is built by hand and gives the game its unique visual style that can’t be matched through standard CG animation. It’s great seeing characters in motion and even noticing the odd fingerprint from the modelers on various surfaces is a nice touch. The only strange thing to mention is that while the game is beautiful, it doesn’t offer you a custom mouse cursor. This means that you are going to be playing with the default Windows mouse icon which is just plain weird. In and of itself, the graphics would almost be enough to sell Armikrog, even if the rest of the game was sub-par, but the game has so many issues outside of the graphics that its hard just to recommend.
Sound is hit or miss. Sometimes the main cast feels like they were recorded in multiple locations and studios using different equipment, and they clearly had little to no direction falling flat and without emotion much of the time. Voices change in volume during the same scene, they often sound like they were recorded inside a tin shed, and many times sound effects will be completely absent, or just miss their cues entirely. The same can be said of the dubbing, as many times the voices do not sync up with the characters. It’s a shame, because there is some genuinely funny dialogue to be heard, it just feels like chore to sit through on many occasions. The music fares better, but with so many other audio issues it does little to help the situation. It all just feels so… unfinished.
The game is also painfully short, and while I usually ignore the price=length argument, it’s hard to overlook a game that can be finished in 2-3 hours costing twenty-five dollars. Again, if the game was fantastic –and Armikrog could have been– I’d still probably overlook price, but that just isn’t the case here. The game suffers from issues that games have resolved ten plus years ago. The biggest offender is the save feature, or apparent lack there of. When you begin a New Game everything is great, but the game offers you no menu screen of any kind to save the game. “No worries” I thought, I’m sure Armikrog auto-saves in some manner. After my first hour and a half play session I came to find out that it does not.
That’s right people, after quitting out for the night and coming back the next day I found that my only option was to begin a New Game. Searching the forums I came across multiple threads asking if the game even had a save feature. Turns out Armikrog does indeed have a save option that does indeed autosave, but it is buried in the Options menu of the game to activate in some convaluted manner. I’m not sure why the developers decided to implement the save functionality of games from pre 1990s, but this was simply annoying.
About as complex as a puzzle gets.
Armikrog should have been great, as it had all the marks of a potential winner. And while the graphics are outstanding, Armikrog is so unfinished, broken, and boring that any fun you can squeeze out of the game is wasted within the first twenty minutes at best. It’s not great, but if I were a backer of Armikrog on Kickstarter I’d be pretty pissed with how things turned out. Stay away from this one if you can. Go out and find a used copy of The Neverhood instead.
*A copy was provided for this review*
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