Keatz: The Lonely Bird Review

There comes a point where I find myself asking the question, when is it okay to review a game before beating it? Well in the past a game like 'Dragon Fin Soup', at launch on the PS4, was so bugged and glitched it was borderline unplayable because of how bugged the game could get with a lot of enemies on screen. The other was Project X Zone 2, where around the ¾ mark of the games the problems it had were so prevalent, I don't see a way the game can possibly have turned around to make that long of an investment be worth it, even if it was a fantastic final quarter. Keatz falls into the latter category around stage nine out of twenty. So a bit of a heads up, I didn't actually finish this game before writing this review, it's about 45% finished.

The big reason on this is the game can be slightly bugged, and with how many things in this game can cause a one-shot death (Buzz saws, spikes, anything large and swinging, many more), getting caught in a ceiling as a buzz saw comes up towards you can be frustrating. There was also a few instances where I swear there was no actual contact, but still, it counted as a kill. There are only a few instances of this being an issue, but there is a second aspect that makes this more frustrating.

No, this was not captured mid movement. That is where the bird stopped moving. 

That is the game has a limited number of lives. Once you run out of lives, you go back to the main menu. You can reload the last stage you were on, but you only get one life. This means that once you run out of your initial run of lives, each death means you have to go through a load screen, enter a menu and reselect the stage, then give it a moment to reload a level. For a game with so many instant death possibilities combined with being a bit bugged it becomes far more frustrating than it otherwise could be.

And on top of that, the challenges themselves aren't all that difficult. The game can kill you a lot if you let the frustrations get to you like it did to me, but if you step back a bit and come back it's pretty simple when you go in aware of bugs that may potentially get you killed. Get rid of those annoyances and the game just becomes a pretty basic, and fairly boring, platformer.

Let's not overlook the story though. The dialogue is just on that line of being so stupid it's funny. The enemy of the game is the government of Heaven, and their plan is to kill all flightless birds because clearly, they are useless. Let's completely ignore the fact that, nine levels in, every single bird enemy I have fought has not actually flown but been on the ground like you are, and focus in the fact any dialogue spoken by the 'government' was listed like this.

Yes, the name that pops up as speaking the dialogue is actually 'Government'. And then there is this, where they refer to a man seeking to genocide an entire segment of this population as a 'dumb decision'.

Every time text comes up in this game, this is what you are in for. It is badly written and just flings its messages directly into your face without any hint of subtlety.

This is simply not a good game, the only positive thing I can really say about it is for the three dollar price point it doesn't look that bad, and if they fix the bugs it will at least be okay. But even fixing all that, the game still doesn’t' really have much to offer. It's best to just give this one a pass, even in this price range there are other games more worthwhile to pick up.