ARKOS First Playthrough
3I happened to find a good time to fit in a playthrough of Arkos, while waiting for the release of Wizordum - and also Arkos 2, as it turns out, as both are tentatively releasing around the end of this month.
I had played the demos for both Arkos games back in 2023, and based on that I came in with relatively low expectations - the gameplay seemed decent enough, and I wasn't expecting particularly deep game design, but there was at least a bit of movement tech that they could do interesting things with.
Those expectations ended up being pretty realistic. The level design adds a few interesting twists upon the introduction of a couple of particular weapons, but all of the weapons look fairly similar and all share the same ammo pool. Enemies don't have a ton of variety, and either bee-line towards you and do damage upon direct contact, shoot projectiles, or spawn other smaller enemies.
The MIDI soundtrack seems competent - it may not be groundbreaking, but it does enough with layering to avoid sounding corny. The sound design, however, is functional but lackluster; audio cues are present where they should be, but for instance, all enemies make the same exact wake-up sound. And the sound effects are way too quiet - I ended up using KDE's ability to cheat and mix applications over 100% volume, then lower the music volume, to make the sound effects audible whatsoever.
While I think the weapons and enemies were often visually repetitive of each other, I did enjoy the overall aesthetic - though I did find the "flat" enemies to be an odd choice given the use of voxels (and if I recall correctly, this is something that Arkos 2 addresses to some degree). I do wish there were more inventive indications for secrets, however - often they're indicated by a texture variation containing a blatant "X".
Speaking of level design, I would not consider it one of Arkos' strong points. The game dives into required-secrets-for-progression territory about halfway through, and there's one attempt at conveyance that completely whiffed on me near the end of the game that made one level extremely unenjoyable (though I can't say they didn't try to instruct me on what to do). I also would've appreciated more use cases for the Ethereal Sonata - one or two of the use cases I attempted with it were clearly not actually intended...
Moreover, there's almost no reason to bother replaying this on higher difficulties. It seems that the most notable changes between difficulties are (1) how much damage enemies take, and (2) how much resources you get for each potion you pick up. These seem like extremely low-effort ways to scale difficulty, and making enemies tankier tends to just result in combat feeling less satisfying. I went ahead and replayed the final episode on the hardest difficulty (which requires discovering in the hub, Quake-style), and it didn't even feel particularly harder, but I suppose it's arguably less error-tolerant - but in a way that purely feels like a battle of attrition.
Arkos was a decent enough playthrough that I'm still curious to see what Arkos 2 will bring to the table, but if you're already staring down a huge backlog of FPS games - perhaps including some from the 90s that were this game's inspiration - you won't be missing anything groundbreaking by skipping it.
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