XBLIG News, Reviews & Previews

I received an email today from Louis Lavallée the developer of Karnn Age, bringing my attention to the fact that the game had passed peer review, so it's about time I gave it a review.

My first experience of Karnn Age brought memories flooding back to my years as a pimply faced youth sitting in front of my Amiga 500+, with an additional 1MB of memory I might add, playing Smash TV (no doubt the inspiration here). How I used to while away the hours making mush out of the hordes of attacking enemies... Sorry, I digress...

While Karnn Age shares similarities to Smash TV, it is totally unique in itself. It is a single player top down 2d shooter in which your character must fight through nine different levels (up to the time of writing I haven't managed to experience all of them yet) and 3 boss fights. You are almost constantly attacked from all sides, so luckily can run and shoot in different directions using the left and right thumbsticks. Speaking of the controls, they are very simple and make this game one that you can just pickup and go with, which is always good. LS = Move & RS = Shoot Direction - you couldn't get much simpler.

One thing that you need to lookout for is stepping off the grassy area in the centre of the screen and onto the sand as spending too much time here angers the invincible Sun God and causes him to attack you and once that happens, things start to hurt! This fact is brought to your attention at the start of the game by what I found to be a somewhat humorous introduction scene.

Karnn Age provides plenty of powerups throughout the levels to help you on your way to victory; something I didn't experience much whilst playing! The various powerups include health packs and temporary weapon upgrades.

There are also four different difficulty levels on which to play (personally I found the easy one to be a bit of a challenge) and your best performance is saved to replay later should you wish to gain some street cred with your mates.

I really found the name Karnn Age to be very apt as it doesn't take you long to cause enough of it (Carnage)! So if you fancy some destruction and maiming with a whole load or gore thrown in, then this game is a must. It's definitely not one for a quiet family evening at home!

See the Karnn Age trailer below. It gives you a good look into what the gameplay is like and is certainly entertaining