The Mark of Kri Review

As the burly Rau, you can take on several opponents at once easily.

More and more games these days are taking on the challenge of creating a fighting system that lets players fight more than one enemy at once. Each game takes a slightly different approach to the concept, and each approach has met with varying degrees of success. Sony's new action game, The Mark of Kri, is another game chasing the elusive multicharacter fighting system, and it does so quite well and sports some great looks and animation to boot. Unfortunately, the game's level design too often steers you away from this cool fighting system, instead focusing on a rather hackneyed stealth mechanic. The end result is an awkwardly paced game that is theoretically full of cool stuff to do, but the gameplay itself just doesn't let you actually do any of it often enough.

In The Mark of Kri, you play as a barbarian islander named Rau, a young man fresh out of training and ready to take on the world. Your adventures start simply enough--you'll help out various folk who have been accosted by bandits or otherwise caught up in some form of turmoil. Eventually, Rau and his spirit guide, a bird named Kuzo, get wrapped up in a quest to stop evildoers from getting the mark of Kri, a spell powerful enough to open a gateway to a demon-filled dimension and most likely destroy Earth in the process.

You can see through the eyes of Kuzo, your bird companion. And often you'll have to.

In many ways, The Mark of Kri is a standard third-person action game. You run around through its levels, one after another, fighting enemies and solving puzzles. As you proceed from level to level, you're given various challenges that, when completed, will unlock rewards. The game's rewards range from gaining access to battle arenas to concept art and new costumes for Rau--nothing to write home about. You'll also be able to go back through the game's six levels to complete challenges you may have missed the first time through. While the game doesn't feel particularly short, the slow pacing makes The Mark of Kri seem longer than it actually is. Expect to spend eight to 10 hours on the main game, though that number rises a bit if you spend time with the unlockable battle arenas and try to complete all the challenges.

The Mark of Kri has its share of gameplay twists that keep it from being generic. For starters, the aforementioned fighting system allows for the occasional big brawl. Using your trusty sword, you can take on as many as three opponents at a time, but as you upgrade to slower, more powerful weapons, you'll be able to slice through even more than that at once. The lock-on system that makes the fighting system possible is pretty well done. When you push the right analog stick in any direction, a thin "lock beam" extends out from Rau's body. Sweeping this beam over an enemy assigns that enemy to one of your three attack buttons. Sweeping it around quickly in a crowd will give you three targets to choose from. From there, you can move between the attack buttons and execute nicely animated attack combos that flow from forward to back and side to side with ease. When you focus on only one or two enemies, the unassigned buttons can be used as attack modifiers, which give you access to more combo attacks. You can also block with R1, which automatically blocks all incoming melee attacks, regardless of their direction. The combat looks great, and there are a few tactical twists, such as how your sword can get stuck in a tree or how you can get blindsided by an opponent while trying to impale another. In practice, though, you mostly just jam on one attack button after another, and you can block indefinitely whenever you wish to catch your breath.