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Hah, finally, an actual reason to play user-made content in a platformer.
On its own, Below Kryll is a sub-par platformer with lame jokes. You can jump, dash, throw Kunai and hit stuff with your sword. That’s it. If this was all it was, there would be little to set this platformer apart from the fifteen kajillion other platformers out there. What makes this one special is its user-made content. No, not the fact that it has user-made content. The fact that this content is woven directly into the game itself.
It’s not that complicated once you can see a picture of it, so here:
Do you see all those blurry boxes? Those represent different sections of a map. My map actually. Upon loading into Kryll and completing the tutorial, you get to travel around an entire interconnected world that users have created one area at a time. It’s a fantastic concept and in theory should be really exciting. Oh right, I almost forgot–so why would you want to wander around a user-created world? Well, because each area has a shrine crystal, and you need shrine crystals to further the game’s “plot.” Well, I guess that’s not actually much of a motivation, considering the plot is sort of lame. Oh, but you get EXP out of the deal too! Gaining levels soups up your ninja and gives him abilities that make the next level that much easier.
I think the big problem with Kryll is that I do like it conceptually but only conceptually. The game itself isn’t that great and there’s only so many clever things you can stomach with the level editors before you just ask yourself why you’re playing at all. I mean, did I really ever want to play a game with a massive 100 story tall picture of Naruto’s face? Were platforming levels where I was supposed to just stand still and let a moving platform take me around an area, hitting music notes to play a song really what I was missing in my life? No. the answer is no. I want a game like this to be good, but I think it needs to be an actually good game mechanically before it would be worth playing. As such, I’m putting it in Tier 3 which is a shame. It’s more or less a harmless time waster but do I really need my time wasted?
