There is something highly addictive about difficult video games and self-imposed challenges, and when games encourage them, it can easily stretch the playtime from an afternoon to days. Kamikaze Empire is a title that understands this and plays heavily upon the desire for perfection. However, the most popular games players use for self-imposed challenges are not always designed with this purpose in mind. More is needed to hold their attention. Does Kamikaze Empire manage to do this? Read on as Cubed3 joins the troop of endless cute girl-soldiers, charging their way towards inevitable death!
The concept of Kamikaze Empire is very easy to love. It is a hardcore shoot ’em up with an interesting twist: the player has infinite lives. At first glance, that might raise some questions. “Where is the challenge of the game?” is the first one that pops to mind. The answer to this question is the title’s most endearing quality. The difficulty of Kamikaze Empire lies in different challenges, each with its own goals to reach the top rank. These consist of a time to beat, number of deaths, and a final ranking based on the score. The most interesting result of this design is that death isn’t by necessity a setback but an optimal strategy for reaching the goal.
It is a very clever way to make a game that can be challenging without locking out less experienced players from content, since getting through a level is enough to beat it, and one can’t fail at that. However, beating all the challenges can sometimes require quite a lot of gaming skill, creating a game with a very low skill floor, but high ceiling.
There is a lot of praise to be given to this system and its implementation. However, Kamikaze Empire sadly falls short in terms of quality. The music gets horribly repetitive far too quickly for a game that almost expects players to spend a massive amount of time per stage to get all the goal scores, and the art is some of the most basic anime art ever seen in a game.
These are surmountable flaws that slightly diminish the enjoyment. What isn’t is the fact that casually beating the levels is an extremely dull and repetitive task. When not doing challenge runs, the inability to lose makes progressing through the game feel empty and meaningless. This is an issue because it makes players drop the game way before they will attempt some, in all fairness, joy-bringing challenge runs.
Another issue that will even affect the targeted audience is the inconsistent difficulty level of the challenges. There is literally no difficulty curve beyond the initial levels for these challenges, as Kamikaze Empire is sometimes generous with its leeway and at other times it is very strict. The result is that players sometimes just plough through levels without any resistance, only to randomly get stuck for hours due to oddly high goals. The most infuriating example is one level where a goal is to kill 85 enemies. The issue is that the stage only seems to host 84, making said challenge impossible to beat.
The worst part is that it does not feel deliberate at all. The game design is, in general, just all over the place. The only consistent enjoyable thing, despite the aforementioned odd difficulty curve, is the challenges. However, the challenges should elevate a good game into a fantastic, memorable one. It feels like the developer put the cart before the horse here, designing great systems for replayability before creating a game well worth replaying.
Despite all these flaws, it is so difficult not to desire to be truly enamoured by Kamikaze Empire. The way dying is an acceptable – and in some challenges even an encouraged – strategy makes it a truly unique game. It is impossible to deny the true hardcore gamer joy that lies in many of the tougher challenges. However, the road there is paved with truly basic, low-quality visuals, music, and general gameplay. Some games make artistic choices that embrace their low budgets; Kamikaze Empire didn’t. For fans of challenge runs, it is possible to look past the flaws and even find pure bliss here. On the other hand, for the average gamer, this title is one of the clearest to skip in the shoot ’em up genre; a genre that is already notorious in the modern age for being a taste divider.
