Krater: Shadows Over Solstide Reviews
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Quarter to Three was disappointed to say the least, 1/5.
And then there are the fundamental design issues that kill Krater. The idea that you're using a team of three characters, each with two skills and a gadget power, is sound enough. Assuming the character control and pacing are tidied up, Krater could play like a more manageable version of Freedom Force. You can get into a satisfying enough groove of rushing into combat with your tank to draw aggro, stunning a powerful standoff enemy with your regulator, and pumping health wherever needed with your healer's green healbeam. Repeat as needed and maybe huck a grenade on occasion.
But for whatever reason, these characters are meant to be cycled out of your party for a level zero team whenever you reach a new area. Imagine Lord of the Rings where Frodo gets to Rivendell and someone says, (Hey, good work, Frodo. We're going to hand off the Ring to this guy Brodo now. He'll take it from here.) Investment in a character is a staple of RPGs, action or otherwise. But Krater undermines this with its cycling cast of weird pre-named robot dudes in gas masks I haven't seen this many pyros since grinding Team Fortress 2 for unlockables! each with identical skill sets.
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The battles and the world itself are poorly drawn. The joy of Diablo has a lot to do with the wild hack-and-slash of it all. Things breaking, squealing, obligingly spitting out treasure. It's a constant stream of pinatas disguised as a fantasy world. Krater has none of that. The combination of artwork, viewing angle, and viewing altitude conspire to show you very little worth seeing. A few colored beams, an orange arc, the shoulders of some indeterminate bandit or beast, none of which lead to anything of note as you slog through the same tilesets again and again. Sadly, Krater is as empty as its namesake.
While Bag of Games seems reasonably satisfied, 7.2/10.
Krater can be a fun game, but it probably won't hold a person's interest for very long simply because there is such a limited amount of variety. You will spend a majority of the game spamming the same moves over and over again against enemies of the same dozen archtypes. The first hour you spend with Krater will mirror the second, tenth or twentieth. The graphics, setting and characters are inviting but there just isn't enough context to keep you invested in collecting scrap metal or boar scrotums for long.
The only real challenge the game presents is in it's clunky healing system where pressing the hotkey only causes your cursor to become a green cross. You then have to cast it by either futilely attempting to target the wounded team mate amidst the constantly spewing, flashy particle effects erupting on screen while the battle is raging or dragging your cursor across the entire screen to the far upper left corner and casting it directly on their portrait.
Krater might have been an okay game to tide over fans of the (dungeon clicker) crowd until the release of Diablo III or something to get their collective juices flowing a few months after the fanfare had subsided, but instead FatShark opted to release the game in an unfinished state less than a month after the flagship game of the respective genre was released.
