Wild King

[Warlock]

Another flash-based shooter, Wild King is a papercraft-style adventure through a forest. It differs from many shooters in a number of ways- you've got a life bar, hitting walls won't kill you, and the path through the game branches; exploring branches will net you upgrades as you go. It's pretty cool, although the mouse-based control scheme can be a bit dodgy; I found myself really wishing I could just use the keyboard quite a bit... I felt like the mouse just wasn't adequate for some of the maneuvering they were asking me to do, particularly considering that it was easy to move the mouse out of the game window and have it stop tracking entirely.

That being said, it's still fun- took me about 40 minutes to play through. I didn't bother to gold-star all of the stages, which may unlock some new stuff.

- HC

[Vireo Gilvus]

Since I'm not very good at shmups, it took me about two hours to finish the game and get gold stars in every stage. Having a percentage of over 100 (I ended with 110% and 1652 leaves) doesn't have any effect on the game at all. Still, it was a beautiful game, and I had a mostly fun time playing it, even if the auto-scroll was too fast, there were too many "crush" traps, the bosses' attacks were too hard to dodge, and some of the power-ups really felt more like downgrades. One thing's for sure; I wasn't expecting such a degree of whimsy and quirkiness from a game without "Mario", "Kirby", "Yoshi", "Katamari", or "LocoRoco" in the title.

EDIT: Were there any achievements for this game? I feel like I was cheated.

[Warlock]

I didn't mind the auto-scroll too much, but I found that a number of bosses had attacks that looked like you should be able to dodge them in a certain way, but actually you didn't have enough clearance onscreen to do so... EG that helicopter boss with the rotating fist; it looked to me like you should be able to dodge the fist by sticking to the back of the screen, but there was actually just barely not enough space to do so.

I wasn't a big fan of the bombs or the regeneration powerups myself.

IDK about achievements; I generally don't pay that much attention to them... Not all Kongregate games have them, so this one may not.

- HC


ETA: I'm StriderHLC on Kongregate, BTW, if you want to add me as a friend.