izigame.me

Review of the first two chapters, which is what is available when writing this:

Kvark is an FPS that resembles Hrot and Half-Life, A "Half-Like", if you will, with a dire atmosphere (despite some tongue-in-cheek instructional videos), solid gunplay, a no-frills upgrade system, and great visuals. Unfortunately, it brings virtually nothing new to the genre.

PROS:
-Excellent visual style. lighting and texture work are great
-Guns feel good to shoot, core gameplay and moment-to-moment are enjoyable
-Music and SFX are good
-solid level design
-Difficulty balancing is pretty good, game is engaging but not frustrating. This goes a long way
-two bosses are featured, both feel fun and balanced
-engaging with the story is optional

CONS:
-Enemy roster feels small and lacks variety. Encounters feel highly repetitive and you are always waiting for some new enemy to spice up the experience. This is mostly due to primitive AI
-Weapon roster is also standard fare, only one weapon breaks the mold at all (EMP gun) and isn't used to its fullest in any encounters
-First couple hours feel like a giant run-on sentence. Very little variety in weapons, enemies, or locales
-Alternate objectives are pretty uninspired, mostly reduced to "Go hit a button in 2 or 3 other rooms and return to this door"
-HL1-inspired railway section is tedious and adds nothing fun whatsoever to the game
-Game world is gritty but also somewhat sterile, most random rooms aren't very memorable
-upgrade system adds very little to the experience. By the time you complete the game you will have them all, and they are small incremental improvements that have an almost unnoticeable impact on your effectiveness. The ugrade items are also strewn about the levels with no creativity, ensuring that you find almost all of them and removing the possibility of upgrades being a reward for clever player actions.
-secret ares abound, but none of them that I found added any real charm to the world
-Enemy AI targets player's full collision box/capsule instead of a "head location", meaning you will often be shot from around corners, despite having no real visible body

NITPICKS:
-a bit too much time spent picking up items, be it health, armor, upgrade resource (anathemium or w/e it's called), or ammo. hitboxes on some of these were weird and every room just had stuff lying all over the place, just seemed a bit unecessary.
-SFX are created with corridors in mind, and feel incorrect when finally reaching the outside
-"reattach chain" puzzle in the last third of the game requires a rather large leap from the player, makes no sense that the broken chain just magically repairs itself
-Game pulls the ol' "lose all your weapons" bit as a means to reset player progression and add interest, but in practice this isn't very effective. especially since you are handed a gun 10 feet past the magnet that canonically is stripping you of all combat abilities.


A SPECIFIC DESIGN RECOMMENDATION:
-After the first boss, there is a save point, but no healing, and this is immediately followed by an elevator free-fall sequence that damages the player for around ~24 health. So unless you have more than 24 health, you will be killed in the elevator after the boss endlessly unless you reload the save from before the bossfight, and complete it again with enough health remaining.
-This is an unbelievably damnable design decision, you must fix this by one of these two options:
--giving player at least 24 health immediately after boss fight
--remove the damage done during what is a practically a mandatory cutscene.

VERDICT:
Ultimately, quite forgettable. Kvark is a middling shooter propped up by a strong art direction, good difficulty balancing, and a couple cool locales and bossfights. It's fun enough to recommend, but does not leave a lasting impression. 6/10