When playing Battle Worlds: Kronos for the PlayStation 4, I only experienced two emotions: utter frustration and total bliss. But the game is all the better for it and those emotions make your mission wins feel that much better.
Battle Worlds: Kronos is a turn-based real time strategy game, harkening back to the old days of Warcraft 1, and the old Red Alert games. Strategy games where there was no such thing as mercy or difficulty; just get good or die trying. It succeeds superbly at that. The vehicles all feel very well balanced, and everything is silky smooth from start to finish in each mission. It cannot be over stated that Kronos is fantastic to play with everything working superbly.
The opening levels give a great introduction on how to play the game but are still challenging in their own right. I nearly failed the first few missions (pulling wins out by the skin of my teeth, holy moly) simply because I didn’t plan well or because the AI had more units at their disposal. I had to think outside the box to earn “The W”.
There are a few glaring issues with the game that I have noticed thus far such as the corny story’s cinematic scenes and the difficulty. The story seems almost tacked on, much like the aforementioned Red Alert games just, thankfully, without the need to have live actors playing out the cut-scenes. They have some weird movements, which can be quite jarring to see. But there isn’t too much to complain about for a game that was funded on Kickstarter for just over $260,000. I’m glad that they decided to focus on the gameplay rather than the story.
And again, back to the difficulty. This game is hard. Not Dark Souls‘ crushing-your-soul level of difficulty but a difficulty that was quite sharp to experience. You really needed to calculate every situation from start to finish to be successful in this game, which is something that I didn’t catch on to until about the 4th mission or so. Even after this clicked it was still an uphill battle to win every mission. The difficulty is eased a bit by getting reinforcements but it almost feels like giving in to ask for them.
Overall, I’ve been enjoying the game oddly enough and it’s brought back an urge to play some of the newer RTS games out there. The game is available for PS4, Xbox One, and PC. Stay tuned for a full review! Oh, and here is a trailer for the game to send you off!
Quinn Smith is a contributor for AYBOnline. When he isn’t trying to throw his newly deployed Hunter to the wolves, trying to save his Cerberus tank. His Opinions are his own
