Kilta Review

Punch Them Really Hard!

+8

-6

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Kilta Review by Hannibal.

If at first you don’t succeed my suggestion is to try again but harder! Actually that is my advice for life not just this game.

Introduction

I will be honest I new nothing about this going in. I read about people playing this on Twitter, thought to myself “hell I haven’t done a review in a while,” so here we are.
I will do things slightly different. I will talk about what the game is and how it works first. And my thoughts will come at the back end of the article. So with out any more preamble lets get in to it.

Info

Title: Kilta.
Released: 2022.
Platform: PC, [available on steam only] Developer: My True Sound.
price: $12.99 USD.

The Game

This is a pretty simple game. When you start you select 2 characters to begin building up your guild. The first time you play the game you have to take the first 2 characters in the list.
Each character has a set of stats and abilities. As you play the game you will be able to recruit new people and build up your guild. As you get new people you can add them in to the party that you send out on quests.
The quests are the way you advance through the game. When you complete quests you get rewards including weapons, armor, new guild members, guild skills as well as advancing the story.
The story is in 3 chapters, however once you beet the game in normal mode you can unlock the hard mode which has a fourth chapter.

Game Play

The game play is mostly about guild management. Once you start the game you will find your self in the main menu. This is the menu that you will return to after each quest. This is where most of the actual game play happens, so this is a breakdown of that.
Inventory: This is where you can view and equip your items. It is split in to 3 sections. First is weapons which is followed by armor. Each character can have 1 weapon and 1 piece of armor. These can help with physical or magical damage as well as have various other buffs and effects. The third part of the inventory is the blacksmith. Here you can place three items you no longer want and reforge them into something else. This is random so it might make something good and it might not.
Quests: here is where you accept quests…we’ll go through that more in just a moment.
Party: Here you can see the people you have currently in your party, check stats, see there health, see what things they have equipped,
Reserves: This shows you the guild members you have in your guild that are not in your main party. You can also move these characters in to the main party here.
Progress: Here you can see your current progress in the story as well as your final objective.

Once you have selected the members that you want for your party you go up to quests to choose one you would like to undertake. You can select a quest in this new menu and view what enemies you are facing as well as the rewards you will get if you complete it.
Once you confirm you can begin the quest. Here you will be in the placement phase. You can view where the enemies are and place your party members. Both sides have a 3 by 3 grid to set up in.
After your party is placed you start the fight. Once it has begun the characters on both sides will fight it out. The only way you can influence the fight at this point is with guild skills. These might allow you to heal your party members or stun the enemies.
Once the fight is over you can view several different stats including the damage dealt and received by each member of your party. You will then receive any rewards for a job well done. You might have some dialogue either with the overseer or between individual members of the guild before heading back to the guild menu to start the next quest.
If you fail the quest you will not receive any rewards, otherwise it goes the same way.

Story

As you play through the game you will find that there is actually a story unfolding. This is conveyed mostly through your interactions with the overseer. At the start and end of the game as well as after many of the quests you will get some dialogue expanding on the plot.
you will also get interactions between various members of your guild sometimes. You also get to choose responses, reactions, or interactions in these dialogues. This means your choice can affect the story. I don’t know how much this actually makes a difference, but I don’t think it matters very much at all.
However on 1 or 2 occasions these interactions did yield items. Not good ones, but hey beggars can’t be choosers right?

Boss Fights

So this is something I just wanted to briefly talk about. When you take on most quests in this game winning and losing only really makes a difference as winning gets you better equipment making things easier for you down the road.
Throughout the story you will find several boss fights. When you reach these you do have to be more careful as losing means the game is over and you have to start again. you have 1 at the end of each chapter of the story. In the normal mode there is 3 chapters, and in hard there is a fourth chapter. Some of these boss fights will also mean the enemies have some tougher skills, so they present more or at least different challenges.

Accessibility

1 final section before I get in to my thoughts on this game.
The accessibility for this game is pretty good. When you launch the game you hit control alt A to turn on the accessibility mode.
When you do this, the game will speak menus to you, and as this game is mostly played through the menus that is pretty much all it needs. I didn’t bother putting a section about controls as it is almost all arrow keys and pressing enter. control on a character or item to see its stats and a few letters on the top number row of the keyboard to activate guild skills.
But the accessibility works and I think that is all you can really ask for.

A Quick Demo

Here is a short demo of the game.
Pop out the player for the audio demo

My thoughts

As much as I tried to like this game…honestly it is boring. You will spend more time sorting equipment over anything else, and that just shouldn’t be how a game is played.
for all the talk about which guild characters you should use. I set my self up with 5 and never switched. I put 3 hitters in the front row to do damage. and some spell casters in file behind them. got a front line de fence buff and a single file defensive buff and ran 2 thirds of the game like that never moving anything. I only lost 2 quests in my first play through and mostly just gave my people better weapons.
This game is sold as strategy, but in reality simply hit them as hard as possible seems to be the best thing to do.
While the guild skills do allow you to help in the fights, they all have a cool down. You will still spend more time in fights just sitting around while the characters fight it out. The fact you don’t get to do any actual fighting makes this so dull.
I am also very disappointed that losing in a quest didn’t mean anything. Sure losing the boss fights would have, but just losing a normal quest just meant going back to the guild, checking my equipment and going and getting a fresh quest.
Also if you were hoping my mention of dialogue means we have some fine voice acting. I hate to disappoint but it is all just text. While the screen reader gets all this with the accessibility turned on…this game really needed voice acting. As it stands not much captured my interest.
The accessibility also feels a little clunky, the way it keeps jumping you to the top of the inventory menu after you do something started to get very frustrating. Then having to use control to look at stats on things is a really confusing choice; Since with screen readers Control is the key usually used to stop speech. I appreciate accessibility in games but this could have been made better very easily.
Management games can be a lot of fun when well thought and executed. This is neither and while functionally it works that doesn’t make it good.

Final thoughts and rating

going in to this with not even a clue what the game was really didn’t help. As I said above. While functionally this game works. I really have nothing positive to say for it. The story wasn’t engaging, the characters meant nothing to me, the quests weren’t exciting. and I spent far to much time sorting EQ for me to call this fun.
If you read my description above or checked out the game demo and thought I could get in to this. all power to you. But in my opinion it isn’t worth the price tag. Although if this game was free I wouldn’t suggest getting it either.
I will say here that if the rating was on functionality alone this score would be in the 8 out of 10 range. Functionally it is a fine game and for the most part works well.
But taking everything in to consideration.
1.5 out of 10.

Conclusion

Have you played this game? Was I to over the top in my assessment or not? Let me know your thoughts in the comments below.

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