Karmaflow: The Rock Opera Videogame

Bursting with potential, but ultimately a hot mess, and a very frustrating experience.

This Act I needs another few months of work: lots of QA to not only work out the bugs, but also to streamline the gameplay.

Gameplay is, in a word, awful. Think "3D platformer" and groan. These kinds of games take a lot of careful design to get right, and in this case it was more than the team could chew. Controls are very clunky. Through much of the game it doesn't matter, because it's very simple exploration: quite boring, actually. But suddenly the pacing changes dramatically later in the game. The swamp level is pure torture! Ugh. That whole concept really needs to be rethought. If you want the player to be jumping around in 3D, you better make that it's easy to land on stuff. I wanted to throw my whole computer out the window a few times. It's just my own stubbornness that forced me to play through to the very abrupt ending.

The game features a few moments of ethical decisions. Nice, except they seem to have no consequence at all.

The world is gorgeous, like it came right out of a Yes album cover. The music is cool—though there's really nowhere enough of it for this to really be called a "rock opera."

I'm glad I experienced the designer's vision, but I feel like I deserve some kind of special medal for playing through it.

Please guys, you have a rough diamond on your hands. Sit down and work on it more and release it again under a special name—"Remastered" or something—to satisfy the many people who had such high hopes for this.