AceHigh Tales of Kenzera: Zau Review

I am a big fan of the genre but unfortunately I found many things wrong with this game that made it a frustrating and disappointing experience. Combat (part 1) - the enemies are very bland and repetitive. The game has several 'lock-down rooms' where you have to kill all the enemies in an arena before you can progress. Unfortunately these arena battles are a copy of paste of each other so you have to do the same battle again with two mages on either side casting projectiles, a few birds in the air that swoop down on you, and a few grunts in the middle that melee you. I found it very frustrating that the developer put such little effort into this area and assumed the player would enjoy doing the same thing again. It felt like it was just filler. There are 3 boss battles in the game and these battles are fun but the combat in between is very bland. Combat (part 2) - the game looks great in general but in battle your character blends in with the enemies and are the same colour. In the arena battles the camera zooms out so it is hard to know where your character is and which way he is facing and whether he is even standing up so it can take you a few seconds to realise why you aren't hitting enemies. This frustrates the battles and makes them longer. You can also end up unintentionally walking into spikes because you think your character is further from the edge than he is which means an instant kill and you have to start over. Controls during platforming - the platforming sections were the highlight for me but the controls weren't tight. Several times my controller would not recognise a boost jump which meant I would die and have to start the sequence again which is additionally frustrating because the check points are so sparse (see next point). If I play Celeste or Hollow Knight and die I know I've messed up myself, but in this game I felt like I was trying to move my character in a certain way but the game sometimes just didn't recognise it. Checkpoints - there are chase sequences which should have been fun but there are no checkpoints so if you die a couple of minutes into them you have to start again even though there are obvious points where a checkpoint could be added. I read that the developers took these feedback on board and addressed it in a patch. The patch effectively gives you the option to skip the chase sequence entirely rather than add checkpoints. This surprised me as I think gamers do want to do the chase sequences, they just don't want to have to redo the boring first segment they've already done 8 times to get to the hard bits. It made me wonder if the developers understand what gamers want from a game. A few positives are that it did look great and I was having fun when the controls weren't playing up on me. But overall I definitely do not recommend it due to laziness in design with the copy and paste arena battles and frustrating controls and checkpoint system.