Is Krater Game worth to be played?

I am a big fan of RPG games and I have played many of them in past. I was recently searching for new RPG game and I found name of Krater. On researching I found that it is an Indie game for sale on Steam. I watched its trailer but did not find it appealing as it was not a trailer kind of video but just gameplay shown with director’s commentary. There was not much trailer like part which most of the game have. Usually we see part of in game cut scene or something related to game’s story as a trailer, but Krater lacks it. I read the description and found that it is some post-apocalyptic world based game. I wanted to ask people who must have played this game, that is it worth playing Krater or should I stay off it?

Krater game is not worth playing and I think that you will waste money and time playing this game. The first thing that offended me was the wrong promotion of this game. When the first time I viewed and advertisement and the description of the game, it showed that many features are available with this game. For example, multiplayer mode of this game was to be purchased as DLC and also some other things. But after purchasing the game, I found many things shown in advertisement missing. After playing the game for some three hours, I realized that there is no character development in this game. For three hours in Krater game, I have been killing only animals like bears, rats and wolves. The only human like enemy that I have encountered is the bandit. Just to bring variation in them, they have shown them as mutated, just to make them look fierce and big. When in post-apocalyptic world, I expected to be attacked by zombies, big bad green colored orcs, disfigured pirates and freaky eight legged oversized spiders. But here in Krater, the scenario is quite different.

In the advertisement, developers boasted that this game will have more than 200 missions. This was the one factor that attracted me to buy this game. But till now, I must have completed some thirty missions and all were designed in same pattern. The firsdt type of mission that you will see is to find and get some item in an area, it will be protected by enemies and you have to beat them. The second type of mission that you will be playing is of killing some monster or looting items be killing the monster, in short kill the monster. The third type of quest you will find is the Fedex quest. These quests are simple as hell and you don’t have to anything other than walking around and slaying some small time wannabe monsters. The main objective of these missions is to reach the designated point and talk to someone or deliver some item, that’s it. So in other words, there is no variation in the missions, all you have to do is to keep on playing the three types of missions I mentioned in different scenarios.

I too hated this game and didn’t play it more than some eight hours. As developer claimed that Krater game is an RPG game, it lacks the skill tree. I thought that there will be a skill tree which will go on increasing the powers of a character by strength and effectiveness. But there is nothing like it in this game. There are boosters and implants that just enhance the skills and the attributes by a percentage value. That, is having a certain booster will increase the effectiveness of a skill by specified number of value. Similarly, an implant will enhance the value of the attribute of a character in a specific range. Also as we have a main character in all RPG games, which we go on enhancing and improving to make him strong enough to beat the boss at the end. But here in Krater game, there is no hero like character. We have to hire some soldiers and go on improvising them. If the soldier dies, we replace him with new soldier and move further. So in short there is no hero to lead these soldiers and they will keep dying and you will need to buy new ones.

These soldiers also don’t have linear pattern of leveling up. They have tiers and every tier consist of some levels to which the soldier needs to be upgraded. For example, you are given a Tier 1 soldier which will be at level 1. Once you reach level 5 in Tier 1, you upgrade to Tier 2 where you will again begin from level 1. In Tier 2, you will have to reach level 10 to have a Tier 3 ranked soldier. Till now this never happened and my soldier dies before he reaches Tier 3, then again I have to start with hiring a new soldier who is of Tier 1 and level 1. Also there are very less classes of the soldiers which we can choose from. There are only five classes of soldiers consisting of brute, electro shooter, slayer and medic. Since we need to frequently replace the soldiers in Krater, I think there should have been at least eight to ten classes of soldiers to choose from. In short, there is no flexibility and much opportunity to build a soldier. Also if we build a soldier and think that for some mission we don’t need him, we can skip him from our team. Fine, but to get him back in the team, we have to exchange him with some another soldier of higher level than him. Also we can only have three soldiers in our team and every soldier only has 2 skills. Thus, we have to play the game using only six powers. Also there is no balance in distribution of the power and skills of the classes. What I mean is that, if some class has low health than his defensive tactics are high, if some class has high health, then he will have low attack. This whole thing is missing.

The crafting system is also weak in this game and offers nothing new to be excited about. It is the regular stuff of killing the monsters and collect the dropped blueprint. Then get the required material and money, find a crafting spot and build then weapon. There is no armor system in the game. So in short, you have to keep on improving the weapons only and nothing else. Also the level designing is bad in Krater; all the areas are linear in format. They are just filled with some random pack of enemies who spawn at most undesirable spots. The worst maps are the dungeons in this game. I am saying this because, once you kill all the enemies in the dungeon, get the loot items, fulfill your quest and get out of there. Now you think of getting more experience and loot items, you go back in the dungeon thinking that you know the spots where you can earn them, but next time you enter, be surprised as the map has changed. You exit through a dungeon and again re-enter through that same point and whole interior of the dungeon including the position of rooms have changed.

If you think that this worse, then let me tell you that the overland towns in the world of Krater have large cities. These large cities include some four to five houses and handful of NPCs. Most of these NPCs are merchants and traders who can supply you with items for crafting a weapon or some other item. Till now, many modern day RPG games that I have played would have schedule for the NPCs, that is, a specific NPC would be available at a specific point during day and be absent or at other point during night time. But here in Krater, the NPCs keep standing at the same point, be it night or day. They also don’t have any workshop or house from where they may seem to generating the materials and items we get. Another bad thing about AI is that it keeps following you till the end. I mean, if you attack a monster only to realize that it is too powerful to defeat, then you have to skip him. But he will keep following you leading till you change a map.

Even the technical part of the game is not so good for Krater. First of all the game isn’t one with high end graphics but still the requirements are very high. It needs to be played on DirectX 11 mode when running it on Windows XP. When playing this game, I experienced many random crashes that went unexplained. To add to this, I didn’t even like the graphics of the game. When post-apocalypse is mentioned, I expected environment to be dull like in Stalker or Fallout 3. But in Krater, everything is colorful and gives an impression of some puzzle based game. Also the AI design doesn’t seem to be planned in any manner. The developers just designed some monsters, gave them skills and attributes. Then they were lazy to hand place them in the maps. So they let computer place them randomly wherever he wants. The first time when I started the game, by taking a look at graphics, I felt that I am playing Team Fortress 2 again.

Come on guys, Krater is an indie game and no big developer or publisher is involved in it. I actually loved this game though I agree that it lacks some features. The best part of the game is that it doesn’t cost much and second the gameplay is long enough for us to play it for months. I think that it is better than all many of those high end games developed by big name developers. Now when I said an ‘indie game’, it is obvious that not much manpower must have been involved. Also the resources must be restricted and not of high level. Even in this case, Fatshark have developed such a brilliant game, this is worth appreciating. Also they had released a free Beta version when this game was under development. Developers had asked if anyone wanted any change to be done. You could have complained there instead of doing after finished game has been released. If the cost of Krater is considered, I think that this is an awesome game and is giving us more than our money spent on it.