Kurovadis is quite honestly impressive. For some of Kyrieru's earlier work, this is an amazing game. It lacks a lot of thing for an H-game but I think that's ok, since the game itself gives me lots of fun too.
=+Art and animation: It's not the most detailed pixel art game you've ever play but I really like it this way. It feels like a classic arcade/early PC game's pixel art. The enemy design, your character's design, the environment,... and especially the effects like your blaster, sub-weapons, etc. looks very well-made.
=+Sound and music: The sounds are very satisfying, hitting opponents with your attacks feels very good. Other stuff like getting hit, or some of enemy's attacks also sounds really good. Just very good sound design overall. And music is fricking spectacular. Each area has their own very nice theme, and boss's music, though I wish each boss has their own theme, is tense for the battle. If I remember correctly, Kyrieru also made the music, so music + pixel art being good? That's pretty impressive!
=+Gameplay: I find the game to be very smooth and awesome. There are some flaws of course, but I think the pros really outshines the cons.
-Movement: is really fun to mess around. One of the first thing you'll get is "Roll", which is where most of the movement depth comes from. There's up roll and down roll, both can be cancelled into anything like jump, shoot, melee, etc. Down roll can be spammed with shoot to do advanced movement, speeding up the game quite a lot, and up roll gives you a bit more distance to your jump if you use it right. It's this feeling of "I'm doing crazy stuff and doing what speedrunners also do" is what I love about games with advanced movement like this. There's also wall jump, which continues to add depth to the game's movement and really plays into its hardcore parkour.
-Enemy: Each feels very unique from each other, and that's very good. Most of them are well-designed, and are fun to encounter. But there's one that I don't like a lot and that is the skeletons in Succubus Castle, they're the worst type of enemy: Off-screen projectile throwing enemy. Other than that, I think the cast of foes you encounter are very good.
-Offense: This game features a hefty amount of mechanics regarding attack. You have up to 4 types of regular blaster attack that you get throughout the game, 5 sub-weapons that randomly drops from enemies, some noticeably stronger than others. You also have melee, with higher damage to reward you for getting close to the enemy. Melee have a 3-hit combo and a ground pound midair. There's also charge attack, blaster will automatically charge when you're not attacking and melee which requires manual charging.
-Difficulty: Kurovadis is BRUTAL. It's one of the hardest H-games I've ever played, and not because it takes a long time to 100%, or the game is too RNG-based, or because of unfairness. No the game is just honest difficult. This game has 3 difficulty choice: Normal; Easy; Very Easy. I hopped straight into normal even when I know it's the hardest one, and it was unforgiving as hell. Even if you played on the easiest difficulty, there's still lots of challenges. The parkour, for example, requires precise inputs in order to pass them. Some can kill you or cause disadvantages to the next enemy encounters, others just straight up don't let you continue the game without being able to pass it. There are also areas with enemy synergies that you need to smartly approach and not bash your head through it in order to not die.
And of course the mechanics of the game are also worth mentioning. Your roll will avoid "melee" attack and (most of the time) lets you roll through enemies. But it's not invulnerable to projectile, which is unfortunately 90% of the attacks in the game. You'll have to manually move around those by jumping and rolling away and all of that stuff, so you can't exploit your awesome move to your advantage, which I think is a pretty good design choice, even if I wish they'll let you roll through projectiles and make the invulnerability window small or something. What about your sub-weapon? Well you'll lose them when you're hit by an enemy, which means that it'll be super hard to hold on to a sub-weapon you like that'll help you during its duration of use. This game is not suitable for the laid-back H-game player. No, this is some mad hardcore for gamers with lots of skills.
Does it make the game less fun? I don't know. Personally I played the entirety of the game in normal mode in my first playthrough, and I had a great time with its difficulty. It all comes down to who you are and how you'd like to play it. Find the right difficulty for you, and if it's still hard, I probably won't recommend you this game for its difficulty.
=-H-content: This game is serious lacking in this department. Obviously there are H-scenes and CGs on lose, but the problem is that there's barely any mechanics that ties it to the gameplay. There's only a knockdown state (luckily you can trigger on command via pressing H), where some enemies will trigger H-scenes that deal damage to you during it. There's no pleasure gauge, no debuffs from being fucked, no advantage that you can get, nothing "gameplay" related to H-scenes other than taking damage. It also lacks a gallery mode. Yeah, I know, H-game without a gallery mode? If you wanna fap to something, you gotta have to manually walk around to the areas with enemies you haven't fapped to ->intentionally get hit or press H -> gets knockdown -> see your character lose the game -> restart -> rinse and repeat.
=-Quality of life: In the gameplay, there's no map, which is unusual for a metroidvania. Meanwhile, everything else lacks some sort of quality of life. The main menu only has new game, continue, and quit. There's no settings so no resolution or volume change or anything. You can however, toggle between fullscreen and windowed by pressing F4 and changing window size by pressing F5. This game is also one of those pixel art game, where the sprites doesn't scale with the screen size, so you ended up looking at very blurry art throughout the game if you play big screen size. Full screen of this game is also pretty bad, it stretches out instead of adding black bars to the side. Another annoying thing is how every time I boot up the game, its default to New Game instead of Continue, so I sometimes accidently hit New Game and has to press F1 to reboot it or escape the game and boot it up again.
-=+Conclusion: Kurovadis has some the most amazing gameplay and difficulty I've seen. But even so, the gameplay cannot save it from... basically everything else. No settings, no gallery mode,... But still, I think it's worth it if you ever want to give yourself a challenge. 8.25/10
=+Art and animation: It's not the most detailed pixel art game you've ever play but I really like it this way. It feels like a classic arcade/early PC game's pixel art. The enemy design, your character's design, the environment,... and especially the effects like your blaster, sub-weapons, etc. looks very well-made.
=+Sound and music: The sounds are very satisfying, hitting opponents with your attacks feels very good. Other stuff like getting hit, or some of enemy's attacks also sounds really good. Just very good sound design overall. And music is fricking spectacular. Each area has their own very nice theme, and boss's music, though I wish each boss has their own theme, is tense for the battle. If I remember correctly, Kyrieru also made the music, so music + pixel art being good? That's pretty impressive!
=+Gameplay: I find the game to be very smooth and awesome. There are some flaws of course, but I think the pros really outshines the cons.
-Movement: is really fun to mess around. One of the first thing you'll get is "Roll", which is where most of the movement depth comes from. There's up roll and down roll, both can be cancelled into anything like jump, shoot, melee, etc. Down roll can be spammed with shoot to do advanced movement, speeding up the game quite a lot, and up roll gives you a bit more distance to your jump if you use it right. It's this feeling of "I'm doing crazy stuff and doing what speedrunners also do" is what I love about games with advanced movement like this. There's also wall jump, which continues to add depth to the game's movement and really plays into its hardcore parkour.
-Enemy: Each feels very unique from each other, and that's very good. Most of them are well-designed, and are fun to encounter. But there's one that I don't like a lot and that is the skeletons in Succubus Castle, they're the worst type of enemy: Off-screen projectile throwing enemy. Other than that, I think the cast of foes you encounter are very good.
-Offense: This game features a hefty amount of mechanics regarding attack. You have up to 4 types of regular blaster attack that you get throughout the game, 5 sub-weapons that randomly drops from enemies, some noticeably stronger than others. You also have melee, with higher damage to reward you for getting close to the enemy. Melee have a 3-hit combo and a ground pound midair. There's also charge attack, blaster will automatically charge when you're not attacking and melee which requires manual charging.
-Difficulty: Kurovadis is BRUTAL. It's one of the hardest H-games I've ever played, and not because it takes a long time to 100%, or the game is too RNG-based, or because of unfairness. No the game is just honest difficult. This game has 3 difficulty choice: Normal; Easy; Very Easy. I hopped straight into normal even when I know it's the hardest one, and it was unforgiving as hell. Even if you played on the easiest difficulty, there's still lots of challenges. The parkour, for example, requires precise inputs in order to pass them. Some can kill you or cause disadvantages to the next enemy encounters, others just straight up don't let you continue the game without being able to pass it. There are also areas with enemy synergies that you need to smartly approach and not bash your head through it in order to not die.
And of course the mechanics of the game are also worth mentioning. Your roll will avoid "melee" attack and (most of the time) lets you roll through enemies. But it's not invulnerable to projectile, which is unfortunately 90% of the attacks in the game. You'll have to manually move around those by jumping and rolling away and all of that stuff, so you can't exploit your awesome move to your advantage, which I think is a pretty good design choice, even if I wish they'll let you roll through projectiles and make the invulnerability window small or something. What about your sub-weapon? Well you'll lose them when you're hit by an enemy, which means that it'll be super hard to hold on to a sub-weapon you like that'll help you during its duration of use. This game is not suitable for the laid-back H-game player. No, this is some mad hardcore for gamers with lots of skills.
Does it make the game less fun? I don't know. Personally I played the entirety of the game in normal mode in my first playthrough, and I had a great time with its difficulty. It all comes down to who you are and how you'd like to play it. Find the right difficulty for you, and if it's still hard, I probably won't recommend you this game for its difficulty.
=-H-content: This game is serious lacking in this department. Obviously there are H-scenes and CGs on lose, but the problem is that there's barely any mechanics that ties it to the gameplay. There's only a knockdown state (luckily you can trigger on command via pressing H), where some enemies will trigger H-scenes that deal damage to you during it. There's no pleasure gauge, no debuffs from being fucked, no advantage that you can get, nothing "gameplay" related to H-scenes other than taking damage. It also lacks a gallery mode. Yeah, I know, H-game without a gallery mode? If you wanna fap to something, you gotta have to manually walk around to the areas with enemies you haven't fapped to ->intentionally get hit or press H -> gets knockdown -> see your character lose the game -> restart -> rinse and repeat.
=-Quality of life: In the gameplay, there's no map, which is unusual for a metroidvania. Meanwhile, everything else lacks some sort of quality of life. The main menu only has new game, continue, and quit. There's no settings so no resolution or volume change or anything. You can however, toggle between fullscreen and windowed by pressing F4 and changing window size by pressing F5. This game is also one of those pixel art game, where the sprites doesn't scale with the screen size, so you ended up looking at very blurry art throughout the game if you play big screen size. Full screen of this game is also pretty bad, it stretches out instead of adding black bars to the side. Another annoying thing is how every time I boot up the game, its default to New Game instead of Continue, so I sometimes accidently hit New Game and has to press F1 to reboot it or escape the game and boot it up again.
-=+Conclusion: Kurovadis has some the most amazing gameplay and difficulty I've seen. But even so, the gameplay cannot save it from... basically everything else. No settings, no gallery mode,... But still, I think it's worth it if you ever want to give yourself a challenge. 8.25/10
