You intrepid heroes get tatted up, swing swords, and press B to enter. GOKEN faces the CHAIRQUISITION!
Game: GOKEN
Webzone: GOKEN
Devel: GIANTY Inc.
Engine: Unity
Price: £10.99 / £US 14.99 / £CA 16.99
Wazzat: GOKEN is an action filled RPG where you’re in the search for the lost five swords and maybe saving the world too.
Mandatory Disclosure: Devs sent us keys.
CHAIRQUISITION:
– Nooope
– Not sure if want
– Check it out
– Shutupandtakemymonies
Makes with the working
V-
- No support for UHD.
- Has some serious herky-jerk and it’s a known problem.
- The suggestion to slide the openGL settings to high-performance is FSM damned laughable.
- Part of the ChairQAsition is to warn you about shite like this.
- Do NOT pick up this title unless you can overlook legit microstuttering.
M-
- Microstutters are real
- 1080p looks nice scaled to 2160p
P-
- There’s a lot of herky jerk and I didn’t see it drop below 59FerPS at any point.
- This is the perfect example of a game with crappy frame-pacing issues.
- It’s clearly a Unity game, it always spawns on the wrong screen and it has the dark blue screen of nothingness.
Total-
Shiny / Sounds
V-
- I dig the fusion soundtrack.
- Hella pretty
- Well animated
- Honestly it was about 20x better than I expected.
M-
P-
- I’ve said this before, but aesthetics in games should serve to complement the mechanics.
- We’ve had many examples of games which fall on both sides of that.
- GOKEN’s biggest failure in this department is how the visual feedback for combat is almost non-existent.
- The other most noticeable issue is the slightly jaunty camera angle which can make it hard to predict whether or not the swings of your swords will connect.
Total-
Control
V-
- Accept and cancel buttons are arse backwards.
- Pressing B to enter areas or open chests can be hit–or-miss.
M-
P-
- Thankfully you can reverse A and B behaviour in the options
Total-
FUN
V-
- It’s like Disgaea and Torchlight had a babby.
- Interesting story and good ole fashioned text instead of bad voice acting.
- Logical character and weapon progression.
- The ink system is a little confusing but workable.
- Lots of items for buffs but (and I like this) you can ignore them if you get good.
- Boss battles are a wee on the repetitive side.
- Speaking of I would like to see a bit more hit back because enemies don’t always blink red (guessing this is a bug) when booped.
- Has issues, yes but at the end of the day it’s quite savable.
M-
P-
- And this is where the second part of my spiel about aesthetics and mechanics from earlier comes.
- While some of the visual elements are lacking and others can be outright deceitful, the mechanics themselves are solid and the Dark Souls lite style of combat is very satisfying as you level up.
- Going back to earlier areas for the metroidvania style exploring bits you couldn’t before, reveals exactly how much stronger your character is becoming.
- And that’s important in making that backtracking much less tedious.
- The one thing I didn’t like is how, for all its freedom for the most part, there are certain points where the game very much leads you by the nose down a linear path and only unlocks the “open world” after you’ve hit specific set pieces.
- It’s not as bad as Aragami, but I’d rather not feel like my agency is taken away from me for the sake of another in-engine cutscene.
Total-
Final –
