Kvark Review (PC)
Summary: Kvark is a hidden gem of a classic shooter that you should not miss. It is simple but hard to progress which has given the game a unique taste and separates it from just another clone of Half-Life. However, it won’t be a memorable game that you will talk about for the rest of your life.
4
Hardcore Shooter
Sometimes, when there is nowhere to go, nostalgia is there to comfort us. When the complexity of modernity feels too heavy, all we crave for is a little simplicity from the past. This is exactly what Kvark is for me. It is a first-person shooter that uses all the best aspects of 2000s shooters like Half-Life and Doom and mixes it with a strange atmosphere to give a nostalgic yet fresh experience.
Kvark takes place in an underground facility in the Czech Republic that experiments with different usages of uranium and atomic energy. Like every other experiment in video games, this one goes south as well, creating a series of failed experiments that set loose in the facility.
As the players, you have to face the monsters and people who work in this facility because you’ve been there as an underground agent and its cover is blown. The game quickly gives you weapons so you don’t have to wait for long before the action starts and that’s where Kvark shines the brightest; its fights.
I don’t remember playing a hard and difficult shooter in recent memory. The fighting in Kvark not only requires a good reaction and precise aim, but strategy to take down which enemies first. It’s not that the game is unfair, it’s just that enemies are very clever in this game. If you think taking cover will help you, you are wrong, enemies will move around to face you.
Not only that, but enemies have such a deadly aim. These enemies aren’t dumb nor unskillful. Once they see you, they will hunt you, and believe me when I say they have one of the precisest aims I’ve seen in recent games. 9 out of 10 times their shots will hit you directly.
For that reason, you have to be on your toes all the time. Then comes the strategy you have to apply for each encounter because you will surely die in this game. The gameplay itself is fairly simple. You grab the gun, aim, shoot, reload, and switch guns depending on the situation. But the reaction and actions of enemies are what makes this game so darn good and hard.
The game also features a set of upgrades that unlock when you progress. These aren’t game-changing per se but they aren’t useless either. Most of them have passive changes but since you progress and face harder enemies, it will become harder to notice them from a certain point onward.
As much as the gameplay and combats of Kvark were fun, I really loved what they did with the world-building and narrative of the game. Basically, there is no story to follow. You just encounter strange situations and areas in the game that tell the story of its own. The juicy part of it is all the notes and recordings you find throughout the game.
Each of them tells a little story of their own. The person’s feelings about someone working there. A discovery gone wrong or a fight between two colleagues. These are small things but when you read and encounter them, they do a world-building effortlessly. I really loved how they managed to create an atmosphere yet not using any sort of regular narrative we see in modern games.
Kvark’s style and graphics are unique on its own as well. It has a distorted type of pixelated design that matches the world of the game itself perfectly. Yet, the best part of the game’s design comes with the death animation of enemies. How they slowly fall onto the ground or when you headshot them and they try to find their head with their hands.
As silly as that sounds, it works perfectly well with this game. Especially since it’s set in a dark world and situation with lots and lots of gore and blood, it’s a sort of comic relief that works perfectly well and doesn’t ruin the overall tone of the game.
Lastly, I want to add that Kvark isn’t perfect and most importantly isn’t memorable when you finish it. It doesn’t give anything new to the genre nor tries to do so. A game with such potential in its level design and world-building could have done much better.
About the Author
S. Masoud Kazemi An admirer of art that doesn't stop talking about films and games.
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