Kona & SnowRabbit Steam Demo Review
Verdict: Maybe
A comic-styled freeze-and-smash that looks really nice, buried under a cutscene every fifteen seconds of play.
Kona & SnowRabbit is a comic-styled action demo from RascalLab. You play a mischievous ice-art duo (a girl and a bunny who only says S's) who pulled one too many pranks on the veteran artists, so the furious Palette Gang struck back and took your artworks. I picked it off the trailer because it wasn't another variation on the standard games I keep seeing lately. Thirty-six minutes was enough for the one level the demo has.
Maybe. It looks nice, it sounds nice, and the handling is fine when you get to use it. You very rarely get to use it. The cutscenes never let up long enough for me to get into the flow of the game RascalLab have built. A second level with less interruption would have given me enough to call it either way.
Pros
- Looks really nice, especially face-on in cutscenes and the hub
- Freeze-and-hammer combat is responsive, with a slightly aggressive hammer swing
- Handles well on keyboard and mouse
Cons
- Cutscenes interrupt roughly every fifteen seconds, and the hold-F skip is never explained
- The early slide-ramp section can trap you with no teaching, forcing a retry before you have learned anything
- One room in the hub is not translated into English yet
I think the longest I played was fifteen seconds
There are more cutscenes than there is play. The opening comic-panel sequence sets up the premise, which is fine. Once you are off the boat and onto the dock, you take two steps and get a cutscene, then two more and get another. About ten minutes in I worked out that holding F skips them. The game never tells you that. By then I had stopped reading the dialogue and was just holding F every time one started.
Freeze with the rabbit, hammer with the girl
The Action is a freeze-and-smash loop. I shot a beam from my rabbit at an enemy or a crate, it froze in a block, and I walked up and hammered it for coins. The hammer swing is slightly aggressive. It's basically a slow top-down Shooter with the hammer as the finisher. Timed power-up pickups show up later: a Frostbite wand, a Zero Beam that does not work on chests, an ice machine gun. The normal one works just fine, and I kept defaulting back to it. I thought combos should pay out more too.
Between fights
Away from the fighting it is a Platformer with timed jumps, grind rails, and some light puzzling. The freeze beam carries into the puzzles too. I froze a crate to use its weight as a counterweight on a lift platform. The same beam opens walls when you freeze a block then smash it, usually with coins behind, which I remembered from the trailer. You spend the whole level chasing a fish man around a sinking harbour. One early slide section stuck me in a loop before I had learned anything. You can only slide, not jump. I kept bouncing off a ramp until I worked out the game wanted me to go the other way entirely. Grind rails take control of your character while you are on them, which was a small surprise the first time.
The hub, one untranslated room
After the level I dropped into a home base where you repair rooms one at a time. Archive Room Repair cost ten thousand coins and the ice cream upgrade next door was twenty thousand. I had around two thousand seven hundred to spend, so neither was happening. There's a wardrobe I had already unlocked. The Cute, comic-book style suits the hub better than the fighting. The characters look much better face-on than from the top-down game camera. One hub room is a testing area that has not been translated into English yet, and I was clicking through Korean menus with no idea what I was reading.
A bit more of the level
I'd have liked a bit more of the level to get to know it, with the tutorial out of the way and the cutscenes dialled down. I never got the flow of the fighting or the exploring because the cutscene density never let up. A simple level timer for time-trial runs would have been a nice extra too. There is a lot here that looks and sounds good. I just didn't get to play much of it.
Game Info
- Developer
- RascalLab
- Publisher
- RascalLab
- Full release
- TBC
- Platform
- PC
- Multiplayer
- No
- Controller
- No
- Playtime
- 36min
View on Steam
Tags: Action, Adventure, Platformer, Cute, Shooter
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