Kamio Recoil Review – A Classical Tale of Maidens in Space (PC)
In Kamio Recoil there are five anime girls you have to help escape youkai invasion on the Moon. Get ready to propel yourself in zero gravity through increasingly difficult labyrinth style levels!
In a true doujin fashion Kamio Recoil doesn’t provide you with any backstory or a setup. The game just starts and you will be presented with a fairly basic menu screen, followed by a level select menu. But this isn’t to say that the game would be much more enjoyable with all the added frills. It is straight to the point, although I was a bit weary as to why the promotional artwork wasn’t also used in the game in order to flash out the characters and give them more personality.
Kamio Recoil consists of six unique areas with intersecting paths; you can choose which level you want to play next. There is a tiny little preview on the side that can help you gauge what the main theme of the level is. It reminds us of those old arcade games that make you choose and hope for the best rather than hold your hand and tell you everything will be alright.
The game’s core mechanic is gravity, that is, propelling yourself with your primary fire. We’ve seen similar doujin titles like this before (Lethal Application, Miricle Fly) but the goal in this one is just to get to the next stage. There is no time limit or additional lives, which was a bit surprising at first but at the same time we can guess that the developers chose to omit this, making for a much more relaxed experience.
Kamio Recoil is a type of game that doesn’t really explain the plot, characters or anything really. So most of the stuff you will find out soon enough by playing. If you want to get anywhere in Kamio Recoil, the most important thing to do is keep switching characters often. You will early on find a use for each girl that is part of the colorful cast of characters.
The red girl has a flame thrower, purple shoots out lasers, green has a powerful rocket launcher, brown is a machine gun girl and the pink one is a girly girl with no primary weapon. You might think that in a shooting game like this she might be the most useless character ever, but she and the machine gun girl are the best when trying to get somewhere fast and as a plus she does have a fairly powerful sniper as a secondary weapon which is useful when picking off enemies.
You have a number of shots for each girl’s primary and secondary attack. The primary attack also counts as each girl’s health. Enemies damage your primary firepower and when you run out of ammo your girl is dead. When you lose a character you can’t revive it until the next level, but you can replenish both shots with power-ups scattered throughout the levels.
After finishing a few levels and clearing the area there is a boss waiting to test your skills. These boss battles become increasingly difficult making it a rewarding experience. The difficulty isn’t too high but it is challenging enough to make you feel rewarded when you clear the area.
Areas in the game can be pretty varied and we especially loved the water stages which were one of the more trickier with a constantly shifting current propelling you in different directions. A number of times we were left with only one girl on her last legs scurrying to get to the level exit and failing miserably. Those were the most memorable moments and most funny too.
With satisfying score and cute graphics coupled with interesting gameplay, Kamio Recoil offers a lot of fun, while keeping the frustration associated with the genre at minimal. Definitely there is something here for everyone, but those really tough hard-core gamers would be inclined to look elsewhere for more challenging gameplay.
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