I was lucky enough to get an early look of the upcoming roguelite bullet hell shoot ‘em up Attack of the Karens by indie developer Studio Primitive
The
premise is an evil
alien pathogen has mutated four entitled
women and turned them into
cyborgs, the
Karens which is a satire
of the popular memes you may of seen
on Youtube, TikTok and the
like with your aim being to defeat
them to save the world.
I wouldn't say I’m the most well versed in the genre but can definitely say my eyes were opened on the addictive nature of the gameplay once you get into things. The main aim is to defeat all of the Karens in one continuous run but this is not as intimidating as it first seems as you get to keep the tokens collected from each run to upgrade your ship after you die. This gameplay flow really does push the sense of achieving something between each run for that ‘’just one more try’’ feeling.
Something that really helps push this even further is the way that each run mixes up the levels with each boss so your not stuck doing exactly the same thing each play through.
Graphically the game has a strong pixel art style with colour tones very reminiscent of the original Gameboy. Overall art and animation is not too dissimilar to Scott Pilgrim side scrolling beat em up which is definitely a good thing as its such a timeless look. One of the small but really cool touches I noticed straight off the bat was how the HUD fades out as your ship moves towards it which I thought was brilliant as it doesn’t get in the way if you get cornered by often hectic amounts of projectiles flying around the screen. You have a cool CRT filter in the menus that really does enhance the graphics in my opinion but can be turned off if its not to your preference.
The game has a really catchy 8-bit retro-inspired soundtrack with themes for each level and with the nature of randomising the order you do them in it doesn’t really get too repetitive. Saying that at the start of each level you do have a voice over description of each of the Karens you are about to come up against which can be pretty funny but can get repetitive and I would of loved to of heard different variations for each as they did bring a smile to my face the first few times I heard them.
Overall I would definitely recommend to any fans of the roguelite bullet hell shoot ‘em up genre but even more so for people that haven't really experienced them before as this was a fantastic starting point with the game really easing you into things nicely. Once I have finally defeated those Karens I’ll definitely be looking out for more in the genre in the future.
Attack
of the Karens is out on 21st
March 2024 for Switch and
available on Steam published
by Flynns Arcades