Kroll App Review by Mentos

Introduction

When someone told me that Kroll was released on the app store, my first response was: “What is Kroll?” Soon I was reminded that a video was shown of it at the WWDC. The graphics looked very impressive, and the person I was talking to told me how much fun it was. So I said: “What do you do?”. They paused for a moment. Their answer was: “You run around and kill stuff with your club”. Wow, I thought, That sounds like a blast. But I soon realized that you are faced with a similar predicament when trying to describe any video game. In Mario you run and hit blocks with your head and jump on stuff. So I decided the best way to find out about this game was to get it. So I did.

Overview

When you first open up Kroll, you are presented with a splash screen:

This is followed by a “book” that you turn through many pages of. This presents the story line of the game.

About halfway through, you are asked to select a difficulty.

And then there are several more pages to read before you are launched into the world of Kroll.

Kroll is a sidescroller fantasy RPG. You have six button around the edges of the screen. The bottom left and right buttons allow you to move either left or right. This is all you need since the game is a sidescroller. The middle two buttons are your weak attack. This attack doesn’t do as much damage, but is very quick. The button on the left attacks to the left. The button on the right attacks to the right. The top two buttons are your heavy attack buttons. These take longer to perform, but do more damage. Once again, the left button attacks left, and the right button attacks right. 

So basically in this game, you use the directional keys to move along to the right, killing monsters as you go. The object of the game is to stay alive and kill everything that blocks your path – essentially to get to the end of the level. At the end of every few levels you are presented with a boss battle, which is more of a cutscene than anything else. It is still a nice treat to have something different than just walking and attacking in this game, though.

Graphics

The graphics in this game are stunning. This is by far the best game graphics-wise for the iPhone out right now. Some monster templates are reused throughout the game with different “skins”. It’s not a big deal though, because it doesn’t take away anything from the game. 

Even though the game is a sidescroller, it feels more than that. Most sidescrollers are two dimensional because you can only move left or right. This game, although you can only move in those two directions, is fully 3D, and it varies how close you are to the camera, making it seem less two dimensional. At some points in the game it even switches from just a side view to a little bit of a front view.

Overall, the graphics in this game are incredible, and are very high quality.

Gameplay

The gameplay in Kroll is rather repetitive. You basically do the same things over and over again. It’s the little things that keep the game from getting very boring very quickly.

There are monsters of all different sizes, some of which are harder to kill than others. This provides for a little more of a challenge in some parts of the levels. There are also different numbers of enemies in different areas, which can make it harder or easier.

There are also special attacks in this game. Once your blue bar fills up, you can shake your device to perform a more powerful attack move. Not only does it look cool, but it gives another element of depth to the game. These can really help you get out of sticky situations, so use them wisely.

All in all, the gameplay in Kroll is pretty good. After playing for a while the game gets a little boring, and you need to take a break, but you will always be able to come back for more fun whenever you are bored.

Summary

Kroll is a great game. I would rate it 9/10. The reason why it lost a point is because of the lack of diversity in the gameplay (aside from the boss battles) and the short gameplay time. It took me about an hour to beat Kroll. Since DLE is already working on a sequel for Kroll on the iPhone, I think it may have been better to hold off on releasing the game for a couple more weeks and adding some new levels. The good thing here, is that since there are three difficulty levels, you can always play the game again on a harder level. Also, for some reason, even when playing the same level again, the game doesn’t seem to get boring. So it can still provide more and more fun, especially for long trips!

Great game DLE, and I am looking forward to the sequel!