Developer: KaleidoGames
Publisher: KaleidoGames
Platform: PC
Tested on: PC
Beekyr Reloaded – Preview
The animal kingdom is full of different species that try to work together or hunt each other. Sometimes, there are quite some struggles between animals that live close to one another, like bees and wasps. Humans often take the honey-making workers for the yellow-striped stinger and vice versa, but in Beekyr Reloaded, the struggle takes place between these two clans. Get ready to delve into a stingy situation.
Shoot’em up games are still quite popular but mostly revolve around the same or similar subjects. KaleidoGames tries to give their game a fun twist, as you’re a faithful servant of your bee queen but on your way back to the hive, you notice that some things are amiss. A lot of enemies are on your path, while there are unconscious comrades everywhere. When you finally reach your home, it is instantly clear that there has been an attack and that all of your honey is stolen. You immediately jump into action and pursue the thieves, which will lead you to quite some dangerous situations.
This certainly isn’t the common topic, which gives it that extra touch. Also, the graphics are superb and fit the setting perfectly. Your loyal bee has its smaller details, like his helm and fighting gear, while the other enemies each have their own particular characteristics as well. The different environments you need to transverse to get to the wasps are beautifully finished, while the elements in the foreground stand out more than enough for you to see what you need to dodge and what is safe to fly through. At any rate, expect some colorful sceneries while killing your opponents.
Of course, the graphics aren’t the only important aspect for a game and KaleidoGames certainly kept that in mind. Depending on the world, you’ll be greeted by different tunes. In general, they’re quite up-tempo and will give you the urge to smash some enemies and get your stolen goodies back. This also counts for the sound effects, as the shooting sounds match perfectly with the rest of the setting.
There are a few elements that you can expect from a bullet hell game and they’re surely present. Depending on the difficulty level, which is shown at the bottom right of the screen while playing, there will be projectiles coming at you from different angles. Of course, it is your job to dodge these and return some fire as well. How awesome as it might seem to have some real-life guns here, your bee soldier has its own arsenal and might be just as effective. While you’re fighting your way through several enemies, you’ll also be able to obtain power-ups. These don’t trigger new abilities, but you’ll be able to shoot more ‘bullets’ or get a backfire option as well. It’s certainly a good idea to keep an eye out for these, as it makes disposing your enemies a lot easier. Next to the power-up orbs, there are also blue orbs that gives you the possibility to use bombs. You can stack up to five charges but it’s not really clear yet how these work, as there were times that only one bomb was used while all of them were triggered at the same time. Also, it’s not really clear what effect it has as it seems to shield you and attack afterwards.
Holding down your attack button is one way to tackle a level but since there isn’t a save option, you need all of the lives you can obtain. Getting a high accuracy percentage after a level is one way to obtain these, although it isn’t clear what minimum amount is needed. Next to the accuracy, obtaining a certain amount of high-score is also a way to get more chances. This certainly is quite important as you can’t save your game and death means you have to restart. If you’ve cleared a world and started the next one, you can just start from here on rather than doing everything from the start. Of course, jumping in at a certain world means that you will start with basic attacks thus you’ll have a disadvantage than when you would’ve start an area earlier. There are recurring types of levels in each world, which gives you a good idea of what is coming, while it might also make it quite repetitive. For instance, at first there is a ‘normal’ level, followed by one where you need to gather honey and so on.
One problem that was recurring quite frequently were a lot of frame drops on different moments in the game, mostly when the speed of the level increased or a big pack of enemies was incoming. This slow-down mode had its positive side, even though you slow down yourself as well, killing you while you otherwise wouldn’t have. It’s not like it’s game-breaking, but unnecessarily losing lives in a game where you can’t really save in, is quite a pity. There are some other unknown issues present as well which freezes the game on start-up. This is a quite severe problem, which hopefully gets fixed rather soon.
Conclusion
Beekyr Reloaded is on the good way to become a great and fun bullet hell game, with a refreshing story and great graphics. There are some minor issues here and there, the biggest one being the framedrops, but as this game is still in early access, we hope that KaleidoGames will take their time to fix everything and present us with an outstanding game.
Beekyr Reloaded - Preview,
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