Speed is good. Speed is your friend. Speed will kill you if you don’t master it, flailing away without direction or purpose, but there’s always another run to try and get better. Micro-second reaction times can be hard to get right, though, even when there’s only four buttons to deal with. KAZ is a stripped down roguelike that just released on Steam today, and while eventual failure is a given there’s always a chance to improve and get just a little bit further in the next run than the last, if you can just react quickly and precisely enough.
Nobody Can Prove This Isn’t Sonic’s Favorite Dungeon Crawler
There’s not a lot of plot or preamble in KAZ, with the game getting straight to the action. You’re a head moving through a tile layout, and enemy heads appear in the squares. Run into the enemy to defeat it and move on to the next while a timing gauge shrinks down worryingly quickly, or rather it would be worrying if you had any time at all to think about it. The goal is to make a target score within the time limit, and you’ve got no second chances to continue the run if you miss. All you’ve got to work with is the WASD or arrow keys on the keyboard, or a controller plus pad if you really want to, and that’s more than enough to deal with at the speed you need to move.
Everything about KAZ is stripped down to the basics when it comes to controls, with the less you have to think about the better. Move with the arrows, regular enemies go down in a single collision, shielded ones take two hits, fugitive enemies move away until the edge of the board stops them, and traps add a bit of curse to a gauge that’s best left empty. The complications come with the upgrade system, though, which is your standard “choose one of three options” between each level.
KAZ’s depth comes from the huge number of possible upgrades available. Being able to jump over an empty space in the board is a must-have, but so is adding a bit more time to every level for the remainder of the run, or increasing the point value of each enemy. Magic spells become available that are fired off with a sequence of moves, such as down down down up to turn all empty spaces into enemies and enemies into empty spaces. Seeing as you take no damage and need to maximize score as quickly as possible, that’s a fantastic way to turn the empty starting grid into a major payout. The curse that comes from traps, on the other hand, is a debuff, and it once again forces you to choose from three options to find the one that will least screw up the run. A good run starting out can last ten or twelve levels fairly easily, and with a choice of buffs between each level that’s a lot of power you’re earning near the end. If you’ve chosen well, of course.
In addition to that, the start of each run lets you choose an ability that fires off after taking out a certain number of enemies, and most runs also add a few new potential power-ups to the mix. The quest system also pays off, with achievements earning coins that can be spent on themes. Themes basically reskin the game, changing the player character, enemies, and board into new forms while also granting a unique starter ability. The starting character, Kaz, has an explosion that takes out any enemy on the board just before the round ends, for example, while Aku has quicker spell cooldowns and the crab has its fugitive enemies moving on the beat of the background music.
Other than the spells, which want a specific series of moves to trigger, all skills, buffsc and debuffs are functionally passive, even if they have screen-clearing effects. This is because KAZ is fast, and if you want to score anything like decently on the leaderboards you need to keep up without thinking too much. Granted, keeping track of the abilities of the current run’s build while dodging traps and tapping the directional keys with purpose rather than button-mashing takes focus, but that’s very different from careful planning. Although one of KAZ’s five modes is turn-based, where you need to earn the target score within a set number of moves, so if planning is your thing there’s definitely options. (Also, another is a dance pad mode for the DDR fans looking to get more mileage out of their fancy foot-tapping hardware.) For what looks to be a fairly simple game there’s a lot to play with while fighting the unforgiving timer of KAZ, and if one round doesn’t work out right there’s always another behind it to move better, more precisely, and most of all faster.
