KVARK by Latest Past & Perun Creative

It’s been nearly a year and a half since I reviewed HROT, a boomer shooter set in Soviet Czechoslovakia that paid homage to Quake.

Not to be outdone, the combined developers of Latest Past and Perun Creative have upped the ante. Their own game, KVARK, is a boomer shooter set in Soviet Czechoslovakia that pays homage to Half-Life.

While they may not be the first to the market, could KVARK be the best?

Radiation Day

As a nameless employee of the KVARK underground mining and research facility, your state-mandated workday is off to a rough start. You wake up to the sound of alarms going off, and soon you’re fighting for your life against heavily armed people in HAZMAT suits. What exactly happened here? All you know is, you’re gonna have to shoot your way out.

KVARK (the game) is not afraid to wear its influences on its sleeve. The game deliberately echoes Half-Life but paints it a shade of revolutionary red. Whether it’s the industrial setting or blocky graphics, it’s sure to elicit some nostalgia from ’90s PC gamers. There’s even a part where you ride a tram.

Homage aside, KVARK does actually mix things up a bit by skewing more toward the traditional boomer shooter formula than Gordon Freeman ever did. Individual levels have secrets to find that are more about careful examination than Half-Life’s physics puzzles, and there are unlockable perks to mix things up a tad.

Critical Mass

Any first-person shooter is ultimately going to be made or broken by its gameplay. Unfortunately, it’s this area where KVARK stumbles a bit.

While the gunplay itself is competent, it suffers from none of the weapons feeling particularly special or interesting.

However, the much bigger problem comes in the form of the game’s uneven difficulty. While some enemies are a breeze to take down, others that you start encountering early on are not only absolute bullet sponges but will also cut you down in seconds with pinpoint accuracy.

I could forgive the difficulty if it was the usual matter of loading a quick-save, but KVARK slaps you with another limitation here. The game features set, infrequent save points, meaning that a death can mean repeating a significant section of the game over again. It’s a baffling choice given that it feels like shooters have had this figured out since the ’90s.

The game’s art and level design don’t help. While the KVARK facility’s dark colors and metal corridors are clearly meant to create a mood, they’re absurdly repetitive. It leads to chunks of the game feeling like a slog, as many levels bleed together and make the overall experience feel tedious.

The Verdict:

KVARK clearly has a lot of passion and love for the genre behind it. Unfortunately, given the sheer number of good boomer shooters there are these days, it needed to do more to be anything other than serviceable.

Maybe this particular comrade needed more state-mandated education.

KVARK is available via Steam.

Watch the trailer for KVARK below: